5. Ancient Humans Had A Mystery Sex Partner
It turns out that our ancient Homo sapien ancestors not only had sex with Neanderthals and Denisovans (two other species of human which are now extinct), but he may have also got freaky with a fourth mystery relative.
Neanderthals roamed the earth about 30,000 — 130,000 years ago, and although they have a reputation as being hairy, brutish simpletons, they were actually quite advanced in areas such as tool making. Not much is known about the Denisovans, other than they lived in what is now Siberia. Traces of their DNA can be found in modern humans though — Denisovan genes show up in modern Pacific Islanders and people from Southeast Asia and southern China. Neanderthal genes appear in 1 to 4 percent of modern Eurasian people — the EDL for example. We’re still not sure what happened to make these other species extinct, but something did, and now there is only us left. Go us.
New genetic research has shown that these different species of human — including the mystery fourth species — often interbred. Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London, has gone as far as to describe this ancient environment as a “‘Lord of the Rings’-type world” populated by many different human species living along side each other.
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