FLICKR, ERICH FERDINAND
New evidence confirms suspicions that early modern humans, which left Africa some 300,000 to 750,000 years after Neanderthals, probably interbred with the physically stronger hominid species. The contact likely happened in the Middle East, the authors said, sometime after early modern humans left Africa 80,000 to 50,000 years ago.
Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center and his colleagues analyzed a particular segment of the human X chromosome, one of the two sex chromosomes, known as dys44—an 8-kilobase intronic region that flanks the human dystrophin gene and has proved to be a useful marker for human evolutionary studies.Thanks to last year’s complete sequencing of the Neanderthal genome, the researchers could compare the genomes of more than 6,000 modern humans ...
