It's been long accepted that anatomically modern humans interbred with their close relatives, the Neanderthals (pictured) and Denisovans, as they dispersed out of Africa. Photo / File
It's been long accepted that anatomically modern humans interbred with their close relatives, the Neanderthals (pictured) and Denisovans, as they dispersed out of Africa. Photo / File
New evidence has changed what we know about the "out of Africa" story at the roots of modern humanity.
A just-published study, co-authored by a New Zealand scientist, sheds fresh light on the widely-accepted theory that anatomically modern humans interbred with their close relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, as they dispersed out of Africa.
The researchers examined DNA fragments passed down from these ancient hominins to modern people living in Island Southeast Asia and New Guinea now.
They revealed that the ancestry of Papuans include not just one but two distinct Denisovan lineages, which had been separated from each other for hundreds of thousands of years.
In fact, the researchers suggest, one of those Denisovan lineages was so different from the other that they really should be considered as an entirely new archaic hominin species.
Taken together with previous work, the new findings suggested that modern humans interbred with multiple Denisovan populations, which were geographically isolated from each other over deep evolutionary time.
The findings, just published in the journal Cell, showed that modern humans making their way out of Africa for the first time were entering a new world that looked entirely different from the one we see today.
"We used to think it was just us - modern humans - and Neanderthals," said study senior author Murray Cox, of Massey University.
"We now know that there was a huge diversity of human-like groups found all over the planet. Our ancestors came into contact with them all the time."
The new evidence also unexpectedly showed extra mixing between Papuans and one of the two Denisovan groups, suggesting that this group actually lived in New Guinea or its adjacent islands.
"People used to think that Denisovans lived on the Asian mainland and far to the north," Cox said.
"Our work instead shows that the centre of archaic diversity was not in Europe or the frozen north, but instead in tropical Asia."
It had already been clear that Island Southeast Asia and New Guinea was a special place, with individuals there carrying more archaic hominin DNA than anywhere else on Earth.
The region also was recognised as key to the early evolution of Homo sapiens outside Africa.
But there were gaps in the story.
To help fill those gaps, Cox's team excavated archaic haplotypes from 161 new genomes spanning 14 island groups in Island Southeast Asia and New Guinea.
Their analyses uncovered large stretches of DNA that didn't jibe with a single introgression of genes from Denisovans into humans in the region.
Instead, they reported, modern Papuans carry hundreds of gene variants from two deeply divergent Denisovan lineages.
Massey University's Professor Murray Cox. Photo / Massey University
In fact, they estimate that those two groups of Denisovans had been separated from one another for 350,000 years.
The new findings highlighted how "incredibly understudied" this part of the world has been, the researchers said.
To put it in context, many of the study's participants lived in Indonesia, a country the size of Europe that is the fourth largest country based on the size of its population.
And yet, apart from a couple of genomes reported in a global survey of genomic diversity in 2016, the new paper reported the first Indonesian genome sequences.
There also had been a strong bias in studies of archaic hominins to Europe and northern Eurasia because DNA collected from ancient bones survives best in the cold north.
This lack of global representation in both ancient and modern genome data was well noted, the researchers said.
"However, we don't think that people have really grasped just how much of a bias this puts on scientific interpretations - such as, here, the geographical distribution of archaic hominin populations," Cox said.
As fascinating as these new findings are, the researchers say their primary aim is to use this new genomic data to help improve healthcare for people in Island Southeast Asia.
They say this first genome survey in the region now offers the baseline information needed to set that work in motion.
