Modern-Day People In West Africa Possess DNA From An Unknown “Ghost” Hominin
Homo sapiens may be the only hominin alive today but go back tens of thousands of years ago and the planet was a hodgepodge of various human and protohuman species, including the Neanderthals and Denisovans.
As the result of some interspecies mingling, some of their DNA has been passed down to modern humans: Traces of Neanderthal DNA are still found in people of non-African descent, Denisovan DNA lives on in people of Asian heritage, and researchers recently learned that the DNA of an unknown population of archaic hominins continues to exist in Melanesians.
Now, Arun Durvasula and Sriram Sankararaman from the University of California in Los Angeles believe they have discovered remnants of DNA from an as yet unknown species of ancient hominin in the genomes of the Yoruba people, in West Africa. The find, published in the online archive bioRxiv, is currently awaiting peer review.
Because DNA is easily damaged by weather that is hot and humid, we do not have DNA from any African-dwelling ancient hominins, whereas we do have DNA from those living on other continents. This makes it hard to identify any ancient genes in modern-day African populations.
To skirt around the problem, Durvasula and Sankararaman came up with a statistical method able to highlight any abnormal genetic code without needing the genome of the species it was inherited from. The technique was applied to the DNA of 50 people who had had their DNA sequenced as part of the 1000 Genomes Project.
It turned out that roughly 8 percent of their DNA comes from a "ghost" species – but who are they?
The Neanderthals and Denisovans can be ruled out – we already have their DNA and there is no evidence to suggest they lived in Africa. And it's not the modern-day pygmies. Their DNA has been sequenced and it is not a match.
Homo naledi, a small-brained hominin that could be found roaming around the South African plains 250,000 years ago, is a possible but unlikely contender. Researchers believe they were too different from us genetically to be able to mate and reproduce successfully. As Mark Thomas from University College London, UK, said to New Scientist, “I would be amazed if there was anything of them in us.”
Homo heidelbergensis was a more advanced hominin living in Africa circa 200,000 years ago and a more probable contestant. It could also be that the mystery DNA came from an isolated group of Homo sapiens or population of hominins that are as yet unknown to researchers.
Whatever the answer turns out to be, the study is a reminder that our species did not emerge from a single founding population, Thomas told New Scientist.
Posts: 42920 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
Analyses of Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes have characterized multiple interbreeding events between archaic and modern human populations. While several studies have suggested the presence of deeply diverged lineages in present-day African populations, we lack methods to precisely characterize these introgression events without access to reference archaic genomes. We present a novel reference-free method that combines diverse population genetic summary statistics to identify segments of archaic ancestry in present-day individuals. Using this method, we find that ~7.97±0.6% of the genetic ancestry from the West African Yoruba population traces its origin to an unidentified, archaic population (FDR ≤20%). We find several loci that harbor archaic ancestry at elevated frequencies and that the archaic ancestry in the Yoruba is reduced near selectively constrained regions of the genome suggesting that archaic admixture has had a systematic impact on the fitness of modern human populations both within and outside of Africa.
it is unclear whether the archaic signatures found here are from the same as those found in other African populations[13, 14, 15, 33].
__________
ref
[13] Hammer, M. F., Woerner, A. E., Mendez, F. L., Watkins, J. C. & Wall, J. D. Genetic evidence for archaic admixture in Africa. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, 15123–15128 (2011). URL http://www.pnas.org/content/108/37/15123.
[14]Lachance, J. et al. Evolutionary History and Adaptation from High-Coverage Whole- Genome Sequences of Diverse African Hunter-Gatherers. Cell 150, 457–469 (2012). URL
[15]Hsieh, P. et al. Model-based analyses of whole-genome data reveal a complex evolutionary his- tory involving archaic introgression in Central African Pygmies. Genome Research (2016).
[33]Xu, D. et al. Archaic Hominin Introgression in Africa Contributes to Functional Salivary MUC7 Genetic Variation. Molecular Biology and Evolution 34, 2704–2715 (2017). URL
Posts: 42920 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
posted
Mommy and daddy of Neanderthal, Denisovan and Genetically Modern Humans(GMH)
-------------------- Without data you are just another person with an opinion - Deming Posts: 12143 | From: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable | Registered: Jun 2007
| IP: Logged |
posted
yes, there are pure Africans and there are subsets of Africans.
quote:Originally posted by Black Crystal: does this mean there are no pure modern homosapiens?
-------------------- Without data you are just another person with an opinion - Deming Posts: 12143 | From: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable | Registered: Jun 2007
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Elite Diasporan: This was dicussed many times here... Does this warrent another thread?
It hasn't been discussed many times.
Recovering signals of ghost archaic admixture in the genomes of present-day Africans Arun Durvasula, Sriram Sankararaman
This is a 2018 primary source article that has just been published and as we have seen with other articles, they sometimes make changes from the pre-print form
The preprint form of this article was only once ever mentioned in a post by Tukular in late March, it is at the end of a thread with no further discussion
Further, trace, under 1% Neanderthal ancestry had been mentioned in regard to Yoruba before. However here they are talking about a different hominid and at 8%
Posts: 42920 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
posted
That’s just a man with microcephali Only thing interesting about him is how he choses to live.
Posts: 1781 | From: New York | Registered: Jul 2016
| IP: Logged |
posted
lol! That is the problem the uneducated. They depend on "pictures" to make their point. Absolutely no scientific or technical acumen. Why even bother.
-------------------- Without data you are just another person with an opinion - Deming Posts: 12143 | From: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable | Registered: Jun 2007
| IP: Logged |
Microcephaly is a medical condition in which the brain does not develop properly resulting in a smaller than normal head.[1] Microcephaly may be present at birth or it may develop in the first few years of life.[1] Often people with the disorder have an intellectual disability, poor motor function, poor speech, abnormal facial features, seizures, and dwarfism.[1]
The disorder may stem from a wide variety of conditions that cause abnormal growth of the brain, or from syndromes associated with chromosomal abnormalities.
Microcephaly Found in Babies of Zika-Infected Mothers Months After Birth Nov 22, 2016
Máximo and Bartola were the stage names of two Salvadoran siblings both suffered from microcephaly and related cognitive developmental disability. They were exhibited in human zoos in the 19th century and marketed as lost members of an ancient Aztec race.
No relation between their appearance and Neanderthals. It's a birth defect
Posts: 42920 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
Yes, but its the sign of the times, spirit of the day.
quote:Originally posted by xyyman: lol! That is the problem the uneducated. They depend on "pictures" to make their point. Absolutely no scientific or technical acumen. Why even bother.
.
XD I saw 'Aziz' in a Childress book Africa and Arabia. He used him to say Neanderthal was alive in Africa. Otherwise he gave absolutely no info except a caption. At the time I didn't know Childress was a fraud, fun book to read though.
Neanderthals had pin-heads and slim bodies. Right! Avg Neander skull is XL compared to our L braincase and were broad thoraxed.
Anyway extant inner Africans do have some genetic inheritance from extinct Erectus related Homos.
I don't have an argument about Azzo. Most likely he had a medical condition, but he isn't a carnie fake or a hoax like most of the Bigfoot evidence.
The evidence from the original Zana investigation in the 1960s pointed to Africa, but this was explained away and never followed up. Bryan Sykes recent Mtdna testing in the Zana case revealed the L2c haplogroup from west Africa.
Posts: 4 | From: North America | Registered: Jan 2019
| IP: Logged |
You don't have to. Some people living today have a birth defect called microcephaly. Homo Naledi has been extinct for thousands of years
homo naledi reconstruction
quote:Originally posted by Razumov:
I don't have an argument about Azzo. Most likely he had a medical condition, but he isn't a carnie fake or a hoax like most of the Bigfoot evidence.
The evidence from the original Zana investigation in the 1960s pointed to Africa, but this was explained away and never followed up. Bryan Sykes recent Mtdna testing in the Zana case revealed the L2c haplogroup from west Africa. [/QB]
Zana likely had a similar genetic condition to Julia Pastrana below not restricted to one particular ethnic group
(embalmed body)
Julia Pastrana (1834 – 25 March 1860) was a performer and singer during the 19th century. Pastrana, an indigenous woman from Mexico, was born in 1834, somewhere in the state of Sinaloa.[1] She was born with a genetic condition, hypertrichosis terminalis (or generalized hypertrichosis lanuginosa[2]); her face and body were covered with straight black hair. Her ears and nose were unusually large, and her teeth were irregular. The latter condition was caused by a rare disease, undiagnosed in her lifetime, Gingival hyperplasia, which thickened her lips and gums
After Pastrana's death, her husband contacted Professor Sukolov of Moscow University, had his wife and son mummified, and displayed them in a glass cabinet. He later found another woman with similar features, married her and changed her name from Marie Bartel to Zenora Pastrana, becoming wealthy from her exhibition. Some sources claim that he was eventually committed to a Russian mental institution in 1884 where he died.
The bodies of Pastrana and her son disappeared from the public view. They appeared in Norway in 1921 and were on display until the 1970s, when an outcry arose over a proposed tour of the US and they were withdrawn from public view. Vandals broke into the storage facility in August 1976 and mutilated the baby's mummy. The remains were consumed by mice. Julia's mummy was stolen in 1979, but stored at the Oslo Forensic Institute after the body was reported to police but not identified. It was identified in 1990 and for many years rested in a sealed coffin at the Department of Anatomy, Oslo University. In 1994, the Norway Senate recommended burying her remains, but the Minister of Sciences decided to keep them, so scientists could perform research. A special permit was required to gain access to her remains.[1]
On 2 August 2012 it was reported in Aftenposten that Pastrana would finally be buried in Mexico at an unspecified date.[12] In February 2013, with the help of Sinaloa state governor Mario López Valdez, New York-based visual artist Laura Anderson Barbata,[13] Norwegian authorities, and others, the body was turned over to the government of Sinaloa and her burial was planned.[2] On 12 February 2013, hundreds of people attended her Catholic funeral, and her remains were buried in a cemetery in Sinaloa de Leyva, a town near her birthplace.[
Posts: 42920 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
Models of archaic admixture and recent history from two-locus statistics
Models of archaic admixture and recent history from two-locus statistics Aaron P. Ragsdale and Simon Gravel Department of Human Genetics, McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada December 6, 2018 Abstract We learn about population history and underlying evolutionary biology through patterns of genetic polymorphism. Many approaches to reconstruct evolutionary histories focus on a limited number of informative statistics describing distributions of allele frequencies or patterns of linkage disequilibrium. We show that many commonly used statistics are part of a broad family of two-locus moments whose expectation can be computed jointly and rapidly under a wide range of scenarios, including complex multi-population demographies with continuous migration and admixture events. A full inspection of these statistics reveals that widely used models of human history fail to predict simple patterns of linkage disequilibrium. To jointly capture the information contained in classical and novel statistics, we implemented a tractable likelihood-based inference framework for demographic history. Using this approach, we show that human evolutionary models that include archaic admixture in Africa, Asia, and Europe provide a much better description of patterns of genetic diversity across the human genome. We estimate that individuals in two African populations have 6 − 8% ancestry through admixture from an unidentified archaic population that diverged from the ancestors of modern humans 500 thousand years ago.Posts: 42920 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
posted
See this is the kind of mess I'm talking about. They say that Yoruba have 8% of their genome derived from an unknown Hominin (non-human) but then say that the African E clade is not really African but Eurasian??..
Call me paranoid but I get the feeling genetics is reverting back to Blumenbach racial dialectic, if you know what I mean.
-------------------- Mahirap gisingin ang nagtutulog-tulugan. Posts: 26239 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: See this is the kind of mess I'm talking about. They say that Yoruba have 8% of their genome derived from an unknown Hominin (non-human) but then say that the African E clade is not really African but Eurasian??..
Call me paranoid but I get the feeling genetics is reverting back to Blumenbach racial dialectic, if you know what I mean.
My belief is that all modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) are mixed with “archaics” to one degree or another. Modern African people would be mixed with “archaic” populations (some of them probably sister H. sapiens subspecies) living elsewhere in Africa whereas modern OOA would be mixed with the same plus Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc. I don’t think there is a single H. sapiens sapiens population out there that can claim purity of subspecies.
But yeah, Y-DNA E being Eurasian is just stupid and symptomatic of a strange fixation these supposed experts have on back-migrations into Africa.
posted
Djehuti, you *are* paranoid. West African archaics aren't non-human unless Neanderthals and Denisovans are non-human (and the West Africans were probably closer to Homo sapiens anyway). You guys are fixating on a minority view about L3 back-migration, when in most works this possibility is not even mentioned.
Anyway, there's nothing wrong with back-migration of pre-E into Africa. You guys have no trouble with pre-D migrating from Africa to East Asia, nor should you.
It's the guys who are desperate to make Eurasian E subclades have been in Eurasia all along and never in Africa whose motivations are suspect (just like those who are desperate to make African F subclades have been in Africa all along and never in Eurasia).
Posts: 660 | From: Canada | Registered: Mar 2017
| IP: Logged |
posted
^ Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other archaic Hominids are NOT humans! They are close relatives of humans but not humans themselves. This is like saying zebras are horses.
-------------------- Mahirap gisingin ang nagtutulog-tulugan. Posts: 26239 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
Zebras and horses have different numbers of chromosomes and produce offspring that are almost always infertile; their estimated split time is 1.7-2 million years ago, which is around 3 times as old as the estimated modern human-Neanderthal split time.
Posts: 660 | From: Canada | Registered: Mar 2017
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by capra: That's just semantics.
Zebras and horses have different numbers of chromosomes and produce offspring that are almost always infertile; their estimated split time is 1.7-2 million years ago, which is around 3 times as old as the estimated modern human-Neanderthal split time.
I get why Djehuti sees only the modern human subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, as truly "human". On the other hand, it isn't unheard of to use the same common name for different species within the same genus. For example, there are two extant species in the gorilla genus and three in the orangutan genus, yet both gorilla species are both considered gorillas much as all three orangutan species are called orangutans. So I don't think there's an inherent problem in using "human" for all hominins in the genus Homo, as long as one recognizes a distinction between modern humans (H. s. sapiens) and the other "archaic" species and subspecies.
P.S. I should point out to everyone that "hominin" is the correct word to classify humans and their relatives after the human/chimpanzee split. Hominid, as in Hominidae, now refers to all the great apes (e.g. chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans in addition to humans, etc.).
quote:Originally posted by Djehuti: See this is the kind of mess I'm talking about. They say that Yoruba have 8% of their genome derived from an unknown Hominin (non-human) but then say that the African E clade is not really African but Eurasian??..
Call me paranoid but I get the feeling genetics is reverting back to Blumenbach racial dialectic, if you know what I mean.
Do you have a quote showing the particular researchers showing unknown Hominin in Yoruba are the same researchers with new theory on E being Eurasian?
E being Eurasian is not mainstream accepted yet. It is just a theory. But let's say haplogroup E is Eurasian what would the exact political implications of that? African E carriers already predominate Africa. If it were true E is Eurasian would it not make us melanated folk have additional claim on being genetic and regional place ancestors of other Eurasians at the same time? Did not Elijah Muhammad teach of the Asiatic black man?
Posts: 42920 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
All Homo are human by definition. Us Homo sapiens are just the latest greatest humans.
• Sahelanthropus • Orrorin • Ardipithecus • Kenyanthropus • Paranthropus • Australopithecus are the hominins that aren't humans.
From habilus on to sapiens, all are human. Archaic Homo are all the pre sapiens. Extinct Homo sapiens that don't look like any living ethnies are archaic homo sapiens. They're thought to be part non-sapien by some.
posted
^ Did I say they were the same researchers??! No. So please don't attribute to me things I never wrote or say. I'm merely observing a trend based on multiple studies done by multiple teams or authors when it comes to African archaeo-bio-anthropology and am weary of racialist academic history repeating itself.
quote:Originally posted by Tyrannohotep: I get why Djehuti sees only the modern human subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, as truly "human". On the other hand, it isn't unheard of to use the same common name for different species within the same genus. For example, there are two extant species in the gorilla genus and three in the orangutan genus, yet both gorilla species are both considered gorillas much as all three orangutan species are called orangutans. So I don't think there's an inherent problem in using "human" for all hominins in the genus Homo, as long as one recognizes a distinction between modern humans (H. s. sapiens) and the other "archaic" species and subspecies.
P.S. I should point out to everyone that "hominin" is the correct word to classify humans and their relatives after the human/chimpanzee split. Hominid, as in Hominidae, now refers to all the great apes (e.g. chimps, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans in addition to humans, etc.).
^ Correct. Nuance when it comes to actual species is always important. What I find funny was that just a decade or so ago there was a hypothesis in the making that "truly" modern humans were the result of admixture with Neanderthals and thus 'modernization' of our species began with the OOA people only upon intermixing with Neanderthals. Of course that idea is absurd and was debunked by the archaeological evidence in the African continent as well as genetics, but you even had anthropologists like Sforza dismiss Herto man as ancestral to Europeans but ancestral to Ethiopians even though he lived well before OOA. This is the type of idiotic racialist thinking that apparently has survived the 19th and 20th centuries. Posts: 26239 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
By the way, how the hell can one confuse someone with microcephaly for a Neanderthal when the latter has much larger braincase than even the average human who doesn't have microcephaly??!
Posts: 26239 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
| IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
![[Eek!]](eek.gif)
Printer-friendly view of this topic