| > The story of human evolution is full of ancient trysts. Genes from fossils have shown that the ancestors of many living people mated with Neanderthals and with Denisovans, a mysterious group of extinct humans who lived in Asia In the case of Neanderthals, isn't that "all" people rather than "many" people? Neanderthals are believed to have gone extinct 40000 years ago. But there was an article here the other day about the genetic isopoint [1], which is the most recent time when every human alive then was either an ancestor of every human currently alive or had no descendants that are currently alive. Most researchers put the genetic isopoint somewhere between about 4000-15000 years ago. If both of these are true (or even if not, as long as the genetic isopoint is after Neanderthal extinction), then all my ancestors that descended from Neanderthals and were alive at the genetic isopoint are also your ancestors, and so you are also descended from Neanderthals through them. There seems to be a lot more uncertainty about when the Denisovans went extinct. It seems likely that they were probably also all gone by the isopoint and so "all" rather than "many" probably goes for them too. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24686904 |