Scientists pinpoint time Homo sapians left Africa and bought cosy with Neanderthals

The research looked at the oldest DNA ever recovered and concluded that we and our are very genetically similar to our ancestors, the, Homo neanderthalensis, lived very near to one another in Asia and Europe

The history of the human race is a long and complicated one and, frustratingly, many of our forebares didn’t keep very good notes. Neanderthals had ranged across much of Eurasia for hundreds of thousands of years, but their halcyon days started to come to an end when Homo sapiens moved north from Africa.

Now boffins reckon they may have got to the bottom of exactly when this displacement – and interbreeding – actually took place. Bold Homo sapiens are thought to have first started making the journey north just over 50,000 years ago and spend around 7,000 years getting cosy with Neanderthals.

The research looked at the oldest DNA ever recovered and concluded that we and our are very genetically similar to our ancestors, the, Homo neanderthalensis, lived very near to one another in Asia and Europe. And, it is known that the two groups had children together with the DNA of modern non-Africans having 2% DNA shared with Neanderthals.

A leader of a section of the research, published in the journals Science and Nature, Professor Priya Moorjani, of the University of California, Berkeley, said that the findings added to the belief that the two had a lot in common: “They seem to have mixed with each other for a long period of time,” she said. “I think that shows that we were far more similar than we were different, and I would expect that there would have been a lot of exchange of ideas and cultures.”

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The research compared the DNA of modern humans to samples of ancient people, and used the percentages of various DNA elements present to work out how long ago the interbreeding took place. It led to the conclusion that they mingled 50,500 years ago with that era coming to an end around 43,500 years ago.

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