1 Ever since the first draft of the human genome was completed in 2001 there has been 2 increased interest in identifying genetic changes that are uniquely human, which could account 3 for our distinct morphological and cognitive capabilities with respect to other apes. Recently, 4 draft sequences of two extinct hominin genomes, a Neanderthal and Denisovan, have been 5 released. These two genom...

Over the past ten years the analysis of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has become widespread when dealing with very low quantities of and/or highly degraded DNA. The advantages of mtDNA for this type of analysis have been well documented including its high copy number, which improves the chance of retrieving DNA, and its highly polymorphic, and therefore informative nature. In addition to forensic s...

Fossils of archaic hominins hold more secrets to the history of human evolution than we could possibly have imagined. The finding that DNA can still persist in some fossil records, and, more importantly, be successfully extracted, amplified, and sequenced, came with a big promise: to help answer long-standing questions about the evolutionary origins of modern humans, their patterns of migration...

Recent studies have found evidence of introgression from Neanderthals into modern humans outside of sub-Saharan Africa. Given the geographic range of Neanderthals, the findings have been interpreted as evidence of gene exchange between Neanderthals and modern humans descended from the Out-of-Africa (OOA) migration. Here, we examine an alternative interpretation in which the introgression occurr...

Some present-day humans derive up to ∼5% [1] of their ancestry from archaic Denisovans, an even larger proportion than the ∼2% from Neanderthals [2]. We developed methods that can disambiguate the locations of segments of Denisovan and Neanderthal ancestry in present-day humans and applied them to 257 high-coverage genomes from 120 diverse populations, among which were 20 individual Oceanians w...

Ever since the first draft of the human genome was completed in 2001, there has been increased interest in identifying genetic changes that are uniquely human, which could account for our distinct morphological and cognitive capabilities with respect to other apes. Recently, draft sequences of two extinct hominin genomes, a Neanderthal and Denisovan, have been released. These two genomes provid...

Here, we test whether we could find evidence for a globularization phase in the ontogenetic trajectory of Neanderthals, and thus whether the adult endocranial differences are already established at the time of birth, or develop later. We statistically compared shapes of virtual endocasts extracted from computed-tomographic scans of crania of 58 modern humans [7] and virtual reconstructions of 1...