As DNA testing has improved and become more popular in recent years, millions of people have revelled in the news that their genetic makeup is laced with Neanderthal genes. The first round of genes, discovered in 2010 in a study of Neanderthal fossils the recovered DNA samples from bones, reveals that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals some 60,000 years ago, after the great migration out of Africa and across the glove 60,000 years ago.
As a result, the genes of millions of non-Africans today are one to two percent Neanderthal, with people of African ancestry thought to have little to no Neanderthal DNA.
Yet, using a newly established method of analysing DNA samples, a team of scientists has found evidence that African populations in fact carry Neanderthal DNA – reshaping the narrative of human history as we know it.
The latest findings suggest human and Neanderthal lineages are ore closely intertwined than what was previously thought, and point to far earlier interbreeding events, potentially 200,000 years ago.
As a result, Neanderthals who had interbred err already carrying genes from modern humans when the next big migrations from Africa occurred, around 140,000 years later.
The new discovery throws new light on our understanding of human history (Image: GETTY)
A skull is displayed as part of the Neanderthal exhibition at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris (Image: GETTY)
Joshua Akey, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University and senior author of the research, said: “Our results show this history was much more interesting and there were many waves of dispersal out of Africa, some of which led to admixture between modern humans and Neanderthals that we see in the genomes of all living individuals today.”
The study suggests modern-day Europeans and Asians carry about one percent Neanderthal DNA.
This, compared with the average 0.3 percent for those of African ancestry.
Mr Akey and his team believe that this Neanderthal DNA arrived in Africa with ancient European ancestors who, after many generations, had left Africa, met and mated with Neanderthals and then returned to Africa and mixed with local populations.
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Neanderthal cave-paintings inside the Andalusian cave of Ardales (Image: GETTY)
Ancient modern human cave paintings have been found around the world (Image: GETTY)
Tools displayed for the Neanderthal exhibition at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris (Image: GETTY)
The advent of sophisticated computational genetics analysis methods are in large part to thank for the bombshell discovery, as infrastructure and the rise of artificial intelligence.
The statistical methods allow scientists to line up the Neanderthal genome next to that of an ancient modern humans and DNA from different living populations.
This then gives researchers the tools to figure out whether the different lineages have been steadily diverging or whether there are blips where large chunks of DNA were exchanged at certain time points.
The latest genome sequencing has revealed unnoticed human genes in the Neanderthal genome.
It was once thought that only non-Africans had traces of Neanderthal DNA (Image: GETTY)
These were apparently acquired from interbreeding events dating to about 200,000 years ago.
If true, this is overly significant, as it suggests an early group of humans travelled from Africa to Europe or Asia, where they encountered Neanderthal populations and left a faint genital imprint on them that can be observed more than 100,000 years later.
The paper goes on to highlight the lack of genetics research in African populations, despite the fact modern humans first emerged on the African continent.
This, combined with the modern African populations being the most genetically diverse than the rest of the world combined, will hopefully shed new light on a hitherto unexplored field.
Neanderthal technology is thought to have been sophisticated, their using stone tools and fire (Image: GETTY)
Mr Akey said: “To more fully understand human genomic variation and human evolutionary history, it is imperative to comprehensively sample individuals from all regions of the world, and Africa remains one of the most understudied regions.”
It is not known whether all African populations, some of whose roots stretch into the deep past, share this Neanderthal heritage.
KhoeSan (bushmen) and Mbuti (central African pygmy) populations, for instance, appear to have split off from other groups more than 100,000 years ago.