An article published in the journal “Science Advances” reports the traces of an interbreeding between the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans with a population belonging to another species of hominins called superarchaics because they probably separated from other humans about 2 million years ago. A team of researchers led by anthropologist Alan Rogers studied the ways in which mutations are shared between various populations of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans, concluding that certain sharing patterns indicate that there were five episodes of interbreeding between species including the one occurred over 700,000 years ago between superarchaic hominins and ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

An article published in the journal “Science Advances” reports a genetic research that offers evidence that some West African populations inherited a portion of their genes from an unknown species of hominins. Arun Durvasula and Sriram Sankararaman of UCLA made a genetic comparison of the DNA of 405 African individuals with those available obtained from Neanderthal and Denisovan bones, discovering genetic characteristics that can be attributed to a species other than these.

An article published in the journal “Nature” reports a research on the last known population of Homo erectus. A team of researchers carried out a new series of dating of fossil fragments and sediments present in the Ngandong site, on the island of Java, where the specimens attributed to that species were discovered concluding that that population lived between 108,000 and 117,000 years ago. Previous dating provided very variable results, a precise result can help understand the history of little men in Southeast Asia. That population could actually be the result of an interbreeding between Homo sapiens and another species of hominins, explaining some of its peculiar characteristics.

An article published in the journal “PLOS ONE” reports a study on the causes of Neanderthal extinction based on models created using data on hunter-gatherer populations as parameters. A team of researchers led by Dr. Krist Vaesen concluded that small populations were vulnerable to problems such as inbreeding, the Allee effects that predict a negative impact on individuals’ fitness in reduced populations and demographic fluctuations, factors that over about 10,000 years caused the extinction of this species.