Neanderthals and Denisovans as biological invaders.

摘要: Humans stand out among our close primate relatives as effective biological invaders. Our recent history has included range expansions into remote and harsh geographic regions, invasions by some populations areas long occupied others. Historians tend to frame these events a story of technological economic progress, while admitting that disease sometimes plays central part—a triad made memorable Guns, Germs, Steel: The Fates Human Societies (1). Ancient DNA is revealing deeper prehistory human dispersals, however, showing continuity with understood biologists, not just historians. Now, in PNAS, Rogers et al. (2) find only modern humans but also Neanderthals Denisovans may share surprisingly invasive origin. The Neanderthal Denisovan origins developed rapidly during the past 7 y. Two high-coverage genomes, more fragmentary genome data from handful other individuals, have yielded powerful insights about diversity ancient groups their legacy genetic introgression (3). These archaic deep common history, individual genomes record high inbreeding low gene flow across ranges (4, 5). In new study, ancestral population underwent tight bottleneck, immediately after this diverged African ancestors humans. This bottleneck was rapid, maybe 300 generations, separated quickly thereafter. This dispersal, which unfolded than 600 ka, bears striking parallel much later dispersal Africa Eurasia 100 ka. both cases, small etched all descendants, founder … [↵][1]1Email: jhawks{at}wisc.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1