ABOVE: Self-identified Negritos from various islands of the Philippines.
OPHELIA PERSSON
Until recently, scientists thought the modern humans with the highest proportion of Denisovan ancestry lived in Papua New Guinea and Australia. According to a new study published yesterday (August 12) in Current Biology, however, an Indigenous group in the Philippines called the Ayta Magbukon have 30 to 40 percent more Denisovan DNA than these other frontrunners, for a total of nearly 5 percent of their genomes.
Denisovans were a group of archaic humans first identified from a single pinkie bone in a Siberian cave. They coexisted with modern humans and other archaic human species, such as Neanderthals, for hundreds of thousands of years, until they went extinct an estimated 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. According to Gizmodo, only Pacific Islanders and Southeast Asians have substantial Denisovan ancestry. By comparison, most people in other parts of mainland Asia have less than ...
