A Nature paper co-authored by SFI Professor Michael Lachmann decodes the genome of a ~45,000-year-old human from Siberia.
Researchers analyzed DNA from a fossilized femur, found on the banks of the Irtysh river, near the settlement of Ust’-Ishim. It is the oldest modern human bone found outside of Africa and the Middle East.The man it belonged to possessed a quantity of Neanderthal DNA similar to that of present-day Europeans and east Asians, though in larger segments along the genome.
The lengths of the fossil’s Neanderthal DNA segments revealed a new and better estimate for the time at which interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans might have occurred. The analysis indicates that the two groups interbred 7,000 to 13,000 years before the man lived, or between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago.
Read the paper in Nature (October 23, 2014)
Read the article in National Geographic(October 22, 2014)
Read the article in Science News (October 22, 2014)