Scientists identify gene flow between modern humans and Neanderthals
image for illustrative purpose
Nanjing: A collaborative team of scientists from China and the United States has found ample evidence for gene flow between modern humans and their prehistoric cousins Neanderthals.
Neanderthals are an extinct species of archaic humans who lived as hunter-gatherers in Europe and Western Asia around 400,000 years ago before disappearing around 30,000 years ago, Xinhua news agency reported.
When modern human populations traveled from Africa to the Middle East, they are thought to have shared both the timeline and the landscape with the Neanderthals, marking a period of coexistence and possible genetic mixing.
Researchers from Southeast University in Nanjing and Princeton University developed a method for estimating the presence of human-introgressed sequences within the Neanderthal genome.
