PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Rogers, Alan R.
AU  - Harris, Nathan S.
AU  - Achenbach, Alan A.
TI  - Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestors interbred with a distantly-related hominin
AID  - 10.1101/657247
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 657247
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/10/21/657247.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/10/21/657247.full
AB  - Previous research has shown that modern Eurasians interbred with their Neanderthal and Denisovan predecessors. We show here that hundreds of thousands of years earlier, the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with their own Eurasian predecessors—members of a “superarchaic” population that separated from other humans about 2 mya. The superarchaic population was large, with an effective size between 20 and 50 thousand individuals. We confirm previous findings that: (1) Denisovans also interbred with superarchaics, (2) Neanderthals and Denisovans separated early in the middle Pleistocene, (3) their ancestors endured a bottleneck of population size, and (4) the Neanderthal population was large at first but then declined in size. We provide qualified support for the view that (5) Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of modern humans.One-sentence summary We document the earliest known interbreeding between ancient human populations and an expansion out of Africa early in the middle Pleistocene.