Scientists from the University of Utah in the United States have found that the Neanderthals and Denisovans separated from each other about 744 thousand years ago. According to previous estimates, this event occurred 200 thousand years later. Anthropologists came to this conclusion after testing a new method of analyzing the sequences of ancient DNA. The researchers' article was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This was announced in a press release on the EurekAlert! Website.
Experts have compared the genomes of four human populations - modern Eurasians, modern Africans, Neanderthals and Denisovans. They analyzed several million mutations that were common to two or three populations. It turned out that 20 percent of the sites (regions of one nucleotide in size) had mutations that were found only in Neanderthals and Denisovans, which pushed back the previously established time of divergence of these two groups. If the separation happened later, then there would be more mutations common to both species.
Scientists also found that genetic differences in the DNA of Neanderthals were large enough, indicating that the population of ancient people of this species was large. Previously, it was believed that its size did not exceed 1000 people. The researchers explain this contradiction by the fact that Neanderthals lived in relatively small, isolated groups, but their total number reached tens of thousands.
Denisovsky man is a species or subspecies of extinct people, a few remains of which were first found in the galleries of the Denisovskaya cave in the Altai Territory.