A Genetic Ghost Hunt: What Ancient Humans Live On In Our DNA?

Those Denisovan-like ghosts are not alone, though. Other researchers looking at the DNA of African hunter-gatherers today have used similar methods to find what they say is evidence that the ancestors of those groups mated with other hominins on the continent tens of thousands of years ago.

Perhaps the largest study, published in 2011, looked at the DNA of 61 Africans from the Mandenka, Biaka and San tribes. They compared these genomes to two models of human populations, one of which assumed the Africans’ ancestors interbred with ancient human groups, and one which didn’t. The model that included gene flow from archaic hominins produced results that more closely matched up to actual human populations in the region. <<<<<THE PROBLEM, and MAIN REASON WE WILL NEVER BE ONE AND THE SAME!!!!

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/06/25/ghost-lineages-ancient-humans-dna/

Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe

We generated genome-wide data from 69 Europeans who lived between 8,000-3,000 years ago by enriching ancient DNA libraries for a target set of almost 400,000 polymorphisms. Enrichment of these positions decreases the sequencing required for genome-wide ancient DNA analysis by a median of around 250-fold, allowing us to study an order of magnitude more individuals than previous studies and to obtain new insights about the past. We show that the populations of Western and Far Eastern Europe followed opposite trajectories between 8,000-5,000 years ago. At the beginning of the Neolithic period in Europe, ?8,000-7,000 years ago, closely related groups of early farmers appeared in Germany, Hungary and Spain, different from indigenous hunter-gatherers, whereas Russia was inhabited by a distinctive population of hunter-gatherers with high affinity to a ?24,000-year-old Siberian. By ?6,000-5,000 years ago, farmers throughout much of Europe had more hunter-gatherer ancestry than their predecessors, but in Russia, the Yamnaya steppe herders of this time were descended not only from the preceding eastern European hunter-gatherers, but also from a population of Near Eastern ancestry. Western and Eastern Europe came into contact ?4,500 years ago, as the Late Neolithic Corded Ware people from Germany traced ?75% of their ancestry to the Yamnaya, documenting a massive migration into the heartland of Europe from its eastern periphery. This steppe ancestry persisted in all sampled central Europeans until at least ?3,000 years ago, and is ubiquitous in present-day Europeans. These results provide support for a steppe origin of at least some of the Indo-European languages of Europe.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25731166
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5048219/