Not just Neanderthals: Ghost lineage in Africa left its mark on our DNA
摘要
一项最新研究利用新开发的分析技术，在现代人类基因组中发现了第三个古老人类谱系的痕迹。该谱系被称为“幽灵谱系”，其DNA来源尚不明确，因为目前尚未获得与之对应的古人类基因组。研究显示，这一谱系可能是在现代人类走出非洲之前与之发生混血的。此前虽有相关线索，但一直难以确认。该发现补充了已知的尼安德特人和丹尼索瓦人混血历史，表明现代人类祖先的基因构成比以往认知更为复
When the history of our ancestry is written, the fact that we've interbred with some of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, will have a central role. And it will be tempting to write it as a very tidy story: Once we got genomes from these other groups, it was possible to identify the sequences in our genomes that we shared with them.
But in reality, as scientists started poking large enough collections of data, there were regular hints of some strange ancestry in our genomes. It was hard to pin down, though, at least in part because the 2 percent on average of Neanderthal DNA found in many populations does not guarantee that any two individuals will have the same 2 percent. So having the genomes of those two groups made sense of some things researchers had already been seeing.
But knowing what we do about Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA is now allowing researchers to answer a somewhat different question: Is there anything else? Using recently developed analytical techniques, they find evidence of a third lineage that we apparently interbred with before any modern humans left Africa. Again, there were hints of this earlier, but so far, there's been no genome from a modern human relative to help us understand the details—the source of this DNA remains a "ghost lineage."
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