Researchers seem to have a lot of interest in the sex lives of early humans. Hot on the heals of the story last week that
sleeping with Neanderthals had been good for our immune system, there's another story today of early homo sapiens
sleeping with other homo-something-or-others which are no longer around:
Hammer and his colleagues argue that roughly 2% of the genetic
material found in these modern African populations was inserted into the
human genome some 35,000 years ago. They say these sequences must have
come from a now-extinct member of the Homo genus that broke away from the modern human lineage around 700,000 years ago.
Hammer says this disproves the conventional view that we are
descended from a single population that arose in Africa and replaced all
other Homo species without interbreeding. "We need to modify the standard model of human origins," he says.
Well, I suppose there was no TV in those days, and staring at the cave wall paintings was entertaining for only so long.
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