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From DNA recovered from the bones, researchers deduced that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals some 60,000 years ago, after leaving Africa.

People of African ancestry, it was thought, have little to no Neanderthal DNA.

Using a new method to analyze DNA, however, a team of scientists has found evidence that significantly reshapes that narrative.

After drilling into the stalagmites and pulling out cylinders of rock, the team could see an obvious transition between two layers. On one side were old minerals that were part of the original stalagmites; on the other were newer layers that had been laid down after the fragments were broken off by the cave’s former users. By measuring uranium levels on either side of the divide, the team could accurately tell when each stalagmite had been snapped off for construction.Their date? 176,500 years ago, give or take a few millennia.

Outside Bruniquel Cave, the earliest, unambiguous human constructions are  just 20,000 years old. Most of these are ruins—collapsed collections of mammoth bones and deer antlers. By comparison, the Bruniquel stalagmite rings are well-preserved and far more ancient.

Neanderthals must have been responsible. There simply wasn’t any other hominin in that region at that time.

two new studies have traced the history of Neanderthal DNA, and have pinpointed a number of genes that may have medical importance today.

Among the findings, the studies have found clues to the evolution of skin and fertility, as well as susceptibility to diseases like diabetes. More broadly, they show how the legacy of Neanderthals has endured 30,000 years after their extinction.

Both studies suggest that Neanderthal genes involved in skin and hair were favored by natural selection in humans. Today, they are very common in living non-Africans.

An analysis of clam shells and volcanic rocks from an Italian cave shows that Neanderthals collected shells and pumice from beaches. And due to specific indicators on some of the shells, the researchers also believe Neanderthals waded and dove into the ocean to retrieve shells, meaning they may have been able to swim.

It's fortunate that the shells, as well as the volcanic rock called pumice, were retrieved from the cave and stored at the Italian Institute of Human Paleontology because the cave itself is no longer accessible. Blasting for coastal highway construction buried the cave in the early 1970s.

Shell tools for Neanderthals are rare, and only a few examples of them have been discovered. The majority of tools associated with Neanderthals involve stone spear tips and stone hammers. But there was even less evidence prior to this study that Neanderthals living in Western Europe dove underwater. The study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS.

The recent excavation of a cave site along Portugal's coast revealed a wealth of fossilized remains of food, including fish, birds and mammals. It's estimated that Neanderthals lived in the cave, known as Figueira Brava, between 86,000 and 106,000 years ago.

From the sea, they could feast on limpet, mussels, clams, brown crabs, spider crabs, sharks, eels, sea breams, mullets, dolphins and seals. Marine birds also included mallards, common scoters (a large sea duck), geese, cormorants, gannets, shags, auks, egrets and loons.

Neanderthals living in Italy and across the Iberian Peninsula likely would have followed a similar lifestyle with a Mediterranean climate.

Scientists have reconstructed the genome of a man who lived 45,000 years ago, by far the oldest genetic record ever obtained from modern humans. The research, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, provided new clues to the expansion of modern humans from Africa about 60,000 years ago, when they moved into Europe and Asia.

In December, they published the entirety of a Neanderthal genome extracted from a single toe bone. Comparing Neanderthal to human genomes, Dr. Paabo and his colleagues found that we share a common ancestor, which they estimated lived about 600,000 years ago.

They found that his DNA was more like that of non-Africans than that of Africans. But the Ust’-Ishim man was no more closely related to ancient Europeans than he was to East Asians.He was part of an earlier lineage, the scientists concluded — a group that eventually gave rise to all non-African humans.

Once considered intellectually inferior to modern humans, Neanderthals have enjoyed an image makeover in recent years thanks to new research.

Experts now think the stocky hunters crafted complex tools, buried their dead, spoke a language and expressed themselves artistically.

most individuals alive today are part Neanderthal

Scientists have revealed a surprisingly complex origin of our species, rejecting the long-held argument that modern humans arose from one place in Africa during one period in time.

By analyzing the genomes of 290 living people, researchers concluded that modern humans descended from at least two populations that coexisted in Africa for a million years before merging in several independent events across the continent.

“There is no single birthplace,”

genetic analysis shows, modern humans encountered and bred with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, who lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time.

Their DNA lives on in us even though they are extinct. “In a sense, we are a hybrid species,

A third group of extinct humans, Homo floresiensis, nicknamed “the hobbits” because they were so small, also walked the earth until about 17,000 years ago. It is not known whether modern humans bred with them because the hot, humid climate of the Indonesian island of Flores, where their remains were found, impairs the preservation of DNA

It’s been known for some time that our modern human ancestors interbred with other early hominin groups like the Neanderthals. But it turns out they were even more promiscuous than we thought.

New DNA research has unexpectedly revealed that modern humans (Homo sapiens) mixed, mingled and mated with another archaic human species, the Denisovans, not once but twice—in two different regions of the ancient world.

Some Melanesians (who live in Papua New Guinea and other Pacific islands) were found to have around 5 percent of Denisovan ancestry, while some East and South Asians have around 0.2 percent. One particular gene mutation, which the Denisovans are thought to have passed to modern Tibetans, allows them to survive at high altitudes.

modern humans interbred with Neanderthals because many people, mostly outside of Africa, carry DNA that matches material from the Neanderthals, our heavy-browed evolutionary relatives.

our ancestors also crossed paths and interbred with another distinct hominid species known as the Denisovans.

. What is already evident is that our ancestry cannot be defined by a tidy genealogical tree, but is an ever-evolving, mysterious and wonderfully diverse tangle of roots and branches.

Genetic sequencing found the remains came from individuals who were more closely linked to present-day populations in east Asia and the Americas than populations in Europe.

All the “Bacho Kiro cave individuals have Neanderthal ancestors five-seven generations before they lived, suggesting that the admixture [mixing] between these first humans in Europe and Neanderthals was common,” said Hajdinjak.

Previous evidence for early human-Neanderthal mixing in Europe came from a single individual called the Oase 1, dating back 40,000 years and found in Romania.

in a pair of studies published on Wednesday 0c, researchers have produced the most robust analysis yet of the genetic record of prehistoric Europe.

Looking at DNA gleaned from the remains of 357 ancient Europeans, researchers discovered that several waves of hunter-gatherers migrated into Europe.

The studies identified at least eight populations, some more genetically distinct from each other than modern-day Europeans and Asians

the artifacts associated with the Kents Cavern fossil confirm “what researchers have long suspected, that the human newcomers spread the Aurignacian culture.”

the earlier dates for these fossils meant “that early humans must have coexisted with Neanderthals in this part of the world, something which a number of researchers have doubted.”

The confirmed early appearance of modern humans in Europe gave them more time for contacts with Neanderthals before the latter’s extinction about 30,000 years ago.

Sarah Zhang: You recently published two papers in which you analyzed over 600 genomes from ancient Europeans

Reich: In our hands, a successful sample costs less than $200. That’s only two or three times more than processing them on a present-day person

Reich: In Europe where we have the best data currently—although that will change over the coming years—we know a lot about how people have migrated. We know of multiple layers of population replacement over the last 50,000 years. Between 41,000 and 39,000 years ago in western Europe, the Neanderthals were replaced by modern human populations. The first modern human samples we have in Europe are about 40,000 years old and are genetically not at all related to present-day Europeans. They seem to be from extinct, dead-end groups.

Finds like 300,000-year-old bones from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco suggest that our species arose from several diverse populations that lived across Africa. Meanwhile, bones from Misliya and Apidima tell us that early humans then expanded into other continents, and interacted with other hominins, far earlier than previously thought

The Apidima skulls also suggest that the accepted story of Europe, in which modern humans eventually replaced the long-dominant Neanderthals, is too simple. Instead, Harvati thinks that modern humans were already in Greece about 200,000 years ago; they were then replaced by Neanderthals, who were themselves replaced by humans about 40,000 years ago

A similar cycle of competition, where Neanderthals and humans repeatedly replaced each other, seems to have happened in the Levant, the Middle Eastern region that includes Israel and Syria. “We can’t refer to Homo sapiens as a ‘success’ in terms of being able to move into new areas and stay there,”

tartar is very durable. Just ask these Neanderthals, whose 40,000-year-old tartar scientists recently analyzed to figure out the real paleo diet. Tartar grows in layers—almost like tree rings—entombing DNA from tiny bits of food as well as bacteria in the mouth. Forty thousand years later, scientists can analyze that DNA to reconstruct what was going on in the mouths of long-dead Neanderthals.

Having traveled so far back in time using ancient tartar, some of the same scientists have embarked on a more ambitious project: using the DNA from the bacteria in tartar to figure out how humans settled the 10 million square miles of Polynesia.

Humans first reached the Society Islands, in the center of the Polynesian Triangle, perhaps around 1,000 AD. Then in the span of just a couple hundred years, they took canoes across vast tracts of open ocean to find specks of inhabitable rock as far-flung as Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island. How Polynesians navigated these waters in the 11th century is a subject of considerable fascination. But even more basically, archaeologists are not sure exactly when the islands were settled and in what order. That’s where the tartar comes in.

Hunter-gatherers were prehistoric nomadic groups that harnessed the use of fire, developed intricate knowledge of plant life and refined technology for hunting and domestic purposes as they spread from Africa to Asia, Europe and beyond.

tools and settlements that teach us about the hunter-gatherer diet and way of life of early humans.

evidence of their activities dating as far back as 2 million years ago

before researchers could start analyzing that genetic material, they had to get it. DNA degrades over time, so extracting it from ancient human remains is difficult and costly.

In the end, they had data from 51 individuals — a tenfold increase over the measly four that once gave researchers their only glimpses into this period.

"Trying to represent this vast period of European history with just four samples is like trying to summarize a movie with four still images," Reich said. "With 51 samples, everything changes; we can follow the narrative arc; we get a vivid sense of the dynamic changes over time.