Traces of two "ghost lineages" of extinct human populations lie hidden within our genome, a new study reveals.
One of these ghost lineages left its DNA scattered in all present-day people. The other, a "super-archaic" lineage, dates back nearly 2 million years, researchers reported Thursday (July 30) in the journal Science.
"These extinct populations may have lived hundreds of thousands — or even more than a million — years ago, yet traces of their genetic legacy remain preserved in our genomes today," study co-author Priya Moorjani, a human evolutionary geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, told Live Science.
For decades, experts have found DNA evidence that our species, Homo sapiens, once mated with now-extinct relatives such a...
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