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Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA Discovered in Ancient South Americans

Two archaeological sites in Brazil are revealing the genetic ancestry of some of the continent’s earliest humans.

Scientists investigating the genomes of ancient South Americans have made a surprising discovery: the presence of DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans, two species of humans that are now extinct. The findings complicate our understanding of ancient South Americans and their ancestries.

The research, which interrogated human remains from Brazil, Panama, and Uruguay, also revealed migration patterns of these early South Americans across the continent. It’s the first time that Denisovan or Neanderthal ancestries have been reported in ancient South Americans. The research is published this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“The presence of these ancestries in ancient Native American genomes can be explained by episodes of interbreeding between anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals and Denisovans, which should have occurred millennia before the first human groups entered the Americas through Beringia,” said Andre Luiz Campelo dos Santos, an archaeologist at Florida Atlantic University and the study’s lead author, in an email to Gizmodo.

The research affirmed archaeological evidence of north-to-south migration toward South America, but also indicated migrations occurred in the opposite direction, along the Atlantic coast.

In the recent work, the team compared genomes from ancient human remains found in Brazil, Panama, and Uruguay with ancient remains from across the United States (including Alaska, to represent ancient Beringia), Peru, and Chile. Two ancient whole genomes from teeth found in northeast Brazil that were included in the study were newly sequenced.

In addition to the ancient human genomes featured in the analysis, the team looked at present-day worldwide genomes and DNA sequences taken from Denisovan and Neanderthal remains from Russia.

The latter remains are over tens of thousands of years old (Neanderthals disappear from the fossil record around 40,000 years ago), but some of the human remains are just 1,000 years old, according to the team’s analysis.
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More at the link.