STUDY - FOR Homo Sapiens

Not just Neanderthals,

there's X-men in us too

Humans Have Mated With Multiple Homo Species

London: A new study has found that Neanderthals weren't theonly other Homo species early homo sapiens mixed with.

          Joao Zilhao at the University of Bristol, UK, suggests Homo sapiens migrated from Africa to meet and interbred with other Homo species that have now become extinct. Swedish biologist Svante Svante Paabo's team at the Max Ploanck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, found the first evidence of interbreeding. They reportedlast week that the genome of humans today is roughly 1 to 4% Neanderthal.
           The fact that all non-Africans have this percentage, suggests that homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred sometime between 100,000 and 45,000 years ago, after the first humans left Africa but before they split into regional populations.
          Jeffrey Long at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque presented results from nearly 100 modern human populations at a meeting of the American Association for Physical Anthropologists. They found proof that Eurasians became genetically diverse by breeding with other Homo species after they left Africa, reports New Scientist.
          Also, they observed a spike in genetic diversity in Indo-Pacific peoples, dating to around 40,000 years ago, Again, it's unlikely the diversity came from Homo sapiens interbreeding with Neanderthals, as the latter never travelled tht far south.
          In March, Paabo's team reported the discovery of DNA from a homin in that is probably neither human nor Neanderthal that lived 50,000 to 30,00 years ago, in a cave in southern siberia. They dubbed the creature X-woman, and sequencing machines are already decoding its genome, says Paabo's colleague Ed Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
          Green does not dismiss the idea that X-women or its kind have bred with humans.