Researchers with the help of an artificial intelligence system have discovered an unknown human ancestor that has left behind a genomic footprint in Asian individuals.
Researchers from the University of Tartu – Estonia, Institute of Evolutionary Biology, and the Centre for Genomic Regulation – CRG in Spain collectively used a combination of deep learning algorithms and statistical methods to scan the genome of Asian populations. They found a hominid that existed long ago due to breeding in between different species of ancient human – the Neanderthal and Denisovan. The findings of this study were published in Nature Communications journal. The researchers further concluded that this unknown ancestor then bred with modern humans who arrived in Asia after the ‘Out of Africa’ migration.
For the first time ever, artificial intelligence – deep learning has been used by researchers to study aspects of human evolution. This study will open newer avenues of research pertaining to fields like Evolution & Human Genomics.
Among the ways of distinguishing between two species is that although the two of these may crossbreed, they do not generally create fertile descendants. But in terms of extinct species, this concept is much more complicated.
In actuality, the narrative told by present human DNA blurs the traces of those constraints
, preserving fragments of hominids from other species, such as the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, that coexisted with modern humans more than 40,000 decades ago in Eurasia.Jaume Bertranpetit, principal investigator at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology said that “Out of Africa” occurred almost 80,000 years ago, when human population comprised of modern humans as well left the African continent to migrate to others, resulting in the formation of our current population. He further added that, if current data possed is to be believed that was the exact time when modern humans crossbred with Neanderthals in all the continents excluding Africa, Denisovans in Oceania and probably in South-East Asia. There is no confirmation yet on evidence suggesting crossbreed with a third extinct species.
Hitherto, the existence of the third ancestor was only a theory that would explain the origin of some fragments of the current human genome (part of the team involved in this study had already posed the existence of the extinct hominid in a previous study). However, deep learning has made it possible to make the transition from DNA to the demographics of ancestral populations.
The current study using AI – deep learning has revealed that the extinct hominid is probably a descendant of the Neanderthal and Denisovan populations.
“Our theory coincides with the hybrid specimen discovered recently in Denisova, although as yet we cannot rule out other possibilities,” said Mayukh Mondal, an investigator of the University of Tartu.
