A mysterious population of ancient humans lived in West Africa about half a million years ago, and scientists believe their genes still live on in people today.
One of the features that distinguishes modern humans (right) from Neandertals (left) is a globular shape of the braincase.
This “archaic ghost population” appears to have diverged from modern humans before Neanderthals split off from the family tree, according to the research published by the “Science Advances” journal.
The split appeared to have taken place between 360,000 and a million years ago, say the researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles.
These ancient humans had babies with the ancestors of present-day Africans, much as Neanderthals reproduced with the ancestors of modern Europeans, wrote geneticists Arun Durvasula and Sriram Sankararaman.
DNA from this archaic population makes up between 2% and 19% of modern West Africans’ genetic ancestry, they said.
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Neanderthal (left) and modern human skeleton.
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