Humans and Neanderthals Kept Breeding—and Breeding—for Ages

The origin of us, modern human is probably one of the most ambiguous matters that has ever existed in history! The more we dig into it, the more complex it gets.

Every new fossil raises new suspicions and new theories. DNA analysis just makes it so much more intertwined and complicated. Will we ever be able to solve this mystery of our own origin and evolution? Well, that is something to talk about later. Right now, there are reports that suggest that Neanderthals and us, homo sapiens have crossed the paths more than once in history. Maybe, we are just an evolved version of Neanderthals and homo sapiens.

Now, to talk about Neanderthals, the was an archaic subgroup of the homo species. They were shorter than normal human beings nowadays. There have been multiple claims that suggest that Neanderthals and human beings actually interbred and kept on interbreeding. There are stories that Neanderthals actually interbred with the ancestors of Europeans.

Possibly, Neanderthals, human beings, newly found Denisovans and probably just every homo related species interbred with each other for a long time. If this is true, who do we actually belong to then?

One of the evolutionary geneticists from the University of Cambridge stated that “We’ve got this picture where these events are happening all over the place. But it is very tough for us to pin down any particular single event and say, yeah, we’re really confident that that one happened — unless we have ancient DNA.”

The story goes back to when modern-day human beings finally migrated out of Africa some 60 thousands of years ago. They might have crossed paths with the hominin relatives but the topic of them interbreeding is still blurred.

A professor of genomics at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University stated that we might be seeing at changes from the situation. This time we might actually be going on the right path, knowing about our origin. We are making conclusions that haven’t been made earlier. All we are sure of is that all of the instances from the past helped to shape up the homo sapiens.