Mystery ancestor mated with ancient humans. And its 'nested' DNA was just found.
An unidentified ancestor that interbred with humans may have been Homo erectus (skull shown here).
(Image: © Shutterstock)
Today's humans carry the genes of an ancient, unknown ancestor, left there by hominin species intermingling perhaps a million years ago.
The ancestor may have been Homo erectus, but no one knows for sure — the genome of that extinct species of human has never been sequenced, said Adam Siepel, a computational biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and one of the authors of a new paper examining the relationships of ancient human ancestors.
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