It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
The human family tree is gaining new branches. Researchers have found in modern humans' DNA signs of two previously unknown ancestors – extinct human forms with no fossils or decoded DNA, yet they have left traces in our genome.
Researchers at the prestigious University of California, Berkeley, have made a spectacular discovery: they identified stretches of DNA in the genomes of modern humans (source in German) that come from previously unknown ancestors. The scientists talk about so-called "ghost ancestors," because nothing is yet known about these extinct human groups.
Homo sapiens is today the only human species still alive. In the distant past, however, it shared the Earth with numerous other hominins.
Earlier studies had already shown that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and the so-called Denisovans and had joint offspring. Many people still carry the genetic traces of these encounters in their DNA today. A new study now suggests that there were at least two further, previously unknown human groups that also passed on DNA to our ancestors.
One of these previously unknown ancestors interbred in Africa with the forebears of modern humans more than 50,000 years ago. This happened before the last major migration wave of Homo sapiens to Europe and Asia. The genes inherited at that time now account for around 1% of the DNA of all humans, roughly as much as the share of Neanderthal DNA.
According to the researchers' calculations, this mysterious human lineage had split from the evolutionary line leading to modern humans around 800,000 years ago, roughly at the time when Neanderthals and Denisovans also diverged from one another.
"Earlier studies had already hypothesised that there is a so-called ghost lineage, meaning genetic traces of unknown extinct human lineages in the genomes of modern humans," explains Berkeley doctoral student Yulin Zhang, one of the study's lead authors. "However, it was previously unclear whether this unknown lineage occurs only in Africans and when this admixture happened. We have now been able to identify and map the relevant DNA segments in the genomes of modern humans and show that this ghost lineage is found in all people living today, not just in Africans."
Timeline: 1.8 million years
Even more enigmatic is the second ancestor, which the researchers describe as a "super-archaic ancestor". This human lineage had already branched off from other hominins around 1.8 million years ago. More than 200,000 years ago, it probably interbred in Eurasia with the Denisovans, and via this detour fragments of the ancient DNA finally found their way into the genome of modern humans.
"The evidence for this super-archaic ancestor is particularly exciting because it reveals genetic contributions from a human lineage that lived more than a million years ago, even though no DNA from this population has yet been decoded," says Arjun Biddanda, a postdoctoral researcher at Johns Hopkins University and co-lead author of the study.
"Thanks to ancient DNA from Neanderthals and Denisovans and new genealogical methods, we are increasingly realising that human populations have repeatedly mixed with one another in the course of evolution," says Priya Moorjani, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. "Human evolution therefore resembles less a branching family tree and more a complex network in which different populations were linked by repeated migrations and admixture."
Difference between Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA
Most people outside Africa today carry about 1 to 2% Neanderthal DNA in their genomes. More precisely, on average around 1 to 2% of the genome of present-day Europeans and Asians comes from Neanderthals. This is the result of interbreeding between Neanderthals and early modern humans around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, shortly after Homo sapiens left Africa.
The inherited DNA segments still influence humans today. Some variants are associated with the immune system, skin and hair traits or adaptation to environmental conditions. Others increase the risk of certain diseases or affect the response to infections.
Population groups in Asia and Oceania also carry, in addition to Neanderthal DNA, genetic contributions from Denisovans. Corresponding remains of Denisovans have mainly been sequenced from the Eurasian region:
The genome of the oldest human fossil yet discovered in Mongolia provided new insights into early human history around six years ago. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the Mongolian Academy of Sciences showed that around 25% of the DNA in the approximately 34,000-year-old remains of a woman came from West Eurasian ancestors. The team also found in the woman's genome, as in that of a roughly 40,000-year-old individual from China, DNA traces of Denisovans, the extinct human form that lived in Asia before modern humans arrived there.
It is also interesting that Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with each other as well. From a fossil from Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia, near the borders with Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, it is known that it belonged to a woman with a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father, direct evidence that the two human forms had joint offspring.
The skullcap found in the Salkhit Valley in eastern Mongolia comes from a woman who lived around 34,000 years ago. Institut für Archäologie, Mongolische Akademie der Wissenschaften
Exactly who these "ghost ancestors" and the "super-archaic ancestor" were is still unclear. However, the calculated dates of their divergence fit known human forms. The ghost ancestors could have belonged to Homo groups of the Middle Pleistocene that lived in Africa around 800,000 years ago. The super-archaic ancestor, by contrast, could be identical with or closely related to Homo erectus, which populated Eurasia as early as about 1.8 million years ago.
Friday, June 19, 2026
Human Origins Destroys Core Fascist Mythology – OpEd
How deep history challenges fascist myths of purity, hierarchy, and identity.
The deeper we explore humanity’s past, the harder it becomes to sustain some of the most powerful political myths of the modern world.
For more than a century, authoritarian ideologies have sought legitimacy in origin stories: pure people, ancestral homelands, primordial hierarchies, and civilizational destinies. Fascism, in particular, has always been obsessed with beginnings. Whether in Nazi fantasies of Aryan ancestry, myths of ethnic continuity, or contemporary narratives of demographic replacement and civilizational decline, the past is transformed into a source of authority. History becomes destiny. Origins become a source of legitimacy.
Yet archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and evolutionary science increasingly tell a different story. Research across these fields has challenged older assumptions about purity, hierarchy, and human nature. Deep history reveals migration rather than isolation, cooperation rather than perpetual conflict, and experimentation rather than inevitability.
Few 20th-century thinkers saw this more clearly than Georges Bataille, who observed that competing visions of the past often conceal varying perspectives of humanity.
Better known today for his writings on eroticism, sacrifice, and transgression, French philosopher Bataille was also one of the first major European intellectuals to recognize that prehistory could serve as an antidote to fascist mythology. During the 1930s and 1940s, when fascist movements were mobilizing myths of origin on an unprecedented scale, he turned to cave art, ritual, and the earliest traces of human life, immersing himself in the latest archaeological, anthropological, paleontological, and sociological research.
His writings on prehistory drew extensively on the discoveries and debates of his time, delving into philosophical, anthropological, and political interests at once. What distinguishes humans from other animals? How did symbolic thought emerge? What forms of community existed before states, nations, and organized religions? These questions acquired a particular urgency during the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany, when competing visions of humanity became a matter of life and death.
Studying cave art and the discoveries emerging from sites such as the Lascaux Cave in France, Bataille became fascinated by a simple fact. The artists who painted the walls left no names. They founded no dynasties. They erected no monuments to rulers or conquerors. But they created some of the most extraordinary images in human history. For Bataille, the lack of names was not a footnote; it was the point.
The caves revealed forms of collective creation that preceded authorship, ownership, and sovereignty. Art appeared not as an expression of individual genius or political authority but as a shared symbolic activity through which a community understood itself and its place in the world.
Instead of fascism’s cult of leadership, Bataille discovered a humanity whose earliest masterpieces emerged from participation rather than domination, anonymity rather than glory, and collective creation rather than the cult of personality.
The political implications of these observations became increasingly difficult to ignore during the rise of the totalitarian regimes that would engulf much of Europe and Asia. In his 1933 essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” Bataille analyzed the attraction to sovereignty, authority, and charismatic leadership. In 1936, he founded Acéphale, an anti-fascist intellectual group whose symbol was a headless human figure.
The image was deliberately provocative. Against the Führer, Il Duce, Stalin, and every cult of leadership, Bataille proposed a humanity without a head. The figure was less of a political statement than a symbolic reversal of the principles celebrated by totalitarian movements. Against sovereignty, he imagined forms of collective existence that could not be reduced to a single authority. Against hierarchy, he emphasized participation, reciprocity, and shared experiences.
Prehistory became important not because it provided an alternative mythology, but because it revealed a past that resisted mythological simplification. Bataille turned to caves such as Lascaux as they seemed to preserve traces of human existence before nations, before states, and before centralized authority. What he found there was not an original people or an ancestral race, but forms of collective life that escaped the categories through which modern politics often tends to understand itself.
Against Hobbes
In this sense, Bataille’s reading of prehistory amounted to a direct challenge to one of the founding myths of modern political thought. In Leviathan(1651), Thomas Hobbes famously described life before political authority as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Human beings, he argued, originally lived in a condition of universal conflict—a “war of all against all”—from which only a sovereign power could rescue them.
This image has shaped centuries of political theory. It continues to influence assumptions about human nature and social order. If conflict is primordial, hierarchy appears necessary. If competition is humanity’s defining characteristic, strong authority becomes easier to justify.
Yet few anthropologists, archaeologists, or evolutionary researchers today would recognize early human societies that were part of Hobbes’s description. Over the past century, discoveries from prehistory have gradually eroded the picture of humanity emerging from a primordial war of all against all. Instead, these findings have shed light on how the social bond preceded sovereignty.
Cooperation and Human Success
Research in the 21st century has begun to explain the reasoning behind this. Far from being a secondary achievement of civilization, cooperation was one of the conditions that made civilization possible. Human infants require years of care, and this knowledge needs to be transmitted across generations. Food sharing, communication, and reciprocity were not late cultural inventions. They were essential to survival.
Increasingly, researchers describe Homo sapiens as a uniquely hyper-cooperative species. In a landmark study published in the journal Nature in 2014, the authors argued that cooperative breeding and exceptional levels of social cooperation played a decisive role in the evolution of human cognition and culture. Shared childcare, collective learning, and social transmission enabled forms of cumulative culture unmatched elsewhere in the animal world.
Human beings did not become cooperative because civilization imposed cooperation upon them: civilization became possible because humans were already cooperative. American anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy makes a similar point in Mothers and Others, stating that networks of care extending far beyond biological parents helped shape human evolution. Humans survived because they learned to depend upon one another.
Developmental and comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello reaches a similar conclusion. In A Natural History of Human Morality, he argues that what distinguishes human cognition is not superior individual intelligence but the capacity for shared intentionality—the ability to coordinate attention, goals, and actions with others. Human intelligence, in this view, is fundamentally social.
A similar intuition reappears today in discussions about artificial intelligence (AI). Blaise Agüera y Arcas, an AI researcher, has argued that intelligence is not simply an individual property but something that emerges through communication, learning, and exchange. Language may be less of an instrument of individual advantage than a technology of collective intelligence.
While Hobbes saw society emerging from conflict, many contemporary scholars suggest that society was shaped by cooperation.
The Archaeology of Possibility
The same shift has transformed our understanding of political development. In The Dawn of Everything, authors David Graeber and David Wengrow challenge the familiar narrative of how human societies progressed through a fixed sequence—bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states—becoming more hierarchical at every stage.
Drawing on decades of archaeological research, they describe societies that repeatedly experimented with different political arrangements. Some adopted hierarchical structures only temporarily before abandoning them. Others alternated between centralized and decentralized forms of organization according to seasonal rhythms. Large populations sometimes existed without kings, standing armies, or centralized bureaucracies. These accounts make human history look less like a march toward the state and more like a field of political experimentation.
The implications of this outlook extend well beyond archaeology. If hierarchy is not inevitable, authoritarianism can no longer present itself as the culmination of human development. If human beings repeatedly invented different ways of organizing collective life, then political alternatives are not utopian fantasies. They are historical realities. The past does not reveal our destiny, but another possibility of how to exist.
Deep History Against Race
The anti-fascist implications of prehistory became especially visible during the 20th century.
As Nazi scholars attempted to transform archaeology into a science of racial origins, other researchers moved in the opposite direction. In Man Makes Himself, archaeologist V. Gordon Childe emphasized that human progress is a result of innovation, exchange, and collective invention, instead of a biological destiny. Anthropologist Franz Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Mandismantled theories of racial hierarchy and demonstrated that cultural differences were historical rather than biological. Ethnologist Paul Rivet’s studies of migration and the peopling of the Americas highlighted human circulation, encounter, and mixture over purity and permanence in the region. Working in different disciplines, these researchers arrived at a similar conclusion: the deeper one investigates human history, the less sustainable are the ideas of fixed origins and permanent identities.
Advances in the 21st century in genetics have further strengthened this conclusion. Ancient DNA research has transformed our understanding of the past as dramatically as the discovery of cave art transformed our understanding of prehistoric culture a century ago. Across Eurasia and beyond, genetic studies have revealed repeated episodes of migration, admixture, and exchange that challenge older narratives of stable and isolated populations.
Far from revealing isolated groups preserving fixed identities over millennia, genetics shows continuous movement and transformation. Even Homo sapiens bear the marks of encounters with other human groups, including Neanderthals and Denisovans.
The further we travel into the past, the harder it becomes to sustain fantasies of racial purity.
Why Bataille’s Thinking Remains Important
Prehistory does not provide a political program. It does not tell us how contemporary societies should be organized, nor does it reveal a lost golden age. The important point is not that prehistoric humanity was peaceful, egalitarian, or morally superior. Human violence is ancient. So are domination and conflict.
The lesson is something else.
Deep history undermines some of the stories authoritarian ideologies tell us about humanity. Against the myths of racial purity, it reveals a mixture of races. Against myths of primordial hierarchy, it reveals experimentation with political structure. Against myths of sovereign necessity, it reveals human cooperation. Against myths of fixed identity, it reveals transformation.
Bataille understood that prehistory was not simply about origins. It was also about what happens when origin stories lose their authority. Now, with nationalism and authoritarian politics again looking for acknowledgment in ancestry, identity, and destiny, deep history offers a different perspective. The further back we go, the harder it is for fascism to find validity in historical narratives. Instead, what comes into view is a history of movement and exchange, cooperation and shared invention.
Prehistory doesn’t excuse domination. It doesn’t erase it, either. It places domination in perspective. And at a moment when authoritarianism is once again on the rise, the deep past reveals something both humbling and reassuring: our greatest strength has never been purity or domination, but our capacity to cooperate, connect, and depend on one another.
Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges.
About Yann Perreau Yann Perreau is a writer, educator, contemporary art curator, and writing fellow for the Human Bridges project of the Independent Media Institute. He has published several books with French publishers on climate, anonymity, and more. His articles have appeared in many publications, including Le Monde, the London Review of Books, and Art Press. He has served as a cultural attaché for both the French Embassy in London and the French Consulate in Los Angeles. He holds an MPhil in art history from Paris's EHESS. View all posts by Yann Perreau →
President Donald J. Trump and UFC CEO Dana White arrive at UFC Freedom 250, the mixed martial arts event produced by the Ultimate Fighting Championship, Sunday, June 14, 2026, on the South Lawn of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok)
In a March 2026 paper published in the journal Science Advances, which focused on variability in governance along the autocratic-democratic axis, my coauthors and I found that one of the strongest associations for the 40 case observations, which were part of our study, was between the nature of rituals and the concentration of power.
For this global sample, autocratically organized societies were characterized by spectacles that foment fear and awe, while participatory rituals predominated in more democratically organized contexts. For example, in the region where I study (Oaxaca, Mexico), when governance was typified by distributed power relations, the pre-Hispanic rubber ball game was played in a large court adjacent to a broad, flat open plaza, the Main Plaza at Monte Albán, a space that could accommodate many of the settlement’s inhabitants. Later, however, as political power became more concentrated, the size of ball courts was reduced, access to them became more restricted, and some were even built immediately adjacent to the houses or palaces of ruling families.
Social scientists have long recognized that communal rituals are a universal human experience that binds people together in various ways. Spectacles, often rich in disorienting noise, shock, and awe, tend to captivate observers through the powerful figures at the center of the spectacle, who inspire fear and wonderment, reinforcing authoritarian cults of personality. In contrast, participatory rituals like communal dancing, singing, or chanting tend to instill camaraderie among participants, solidarity, and trust among those involved. As a student of history and a sports fan, the mirrored reflections of the past provide an analytical perspective about the final Knicks game on June 13, a sports agenda that cannot be ignored.
During the 2026 National Basketball Association playoff between the New York Knicks and the San Antonio Spurs, Madison Square Garden, the storied home of the Knicks, once again became like a civic commons after a 53-year championship drought. The competitiveness of the Knicks during the playoffs elevated the space from merely being a site of entertainment to a participatory ritual arena. The crowd did not passively observe; it chanted, rose, groaned, anticipated, and collectively willed momentum into existence. One needed to only look at the faces in the stands—season ticket holders and first-timers, celebrities and subway riders alike—to notice that the sight was closer to what might be considered an integrative ritual: one in which meaning is not imposed from above but generated, often with spontaneity, among participants.
Basketball, by definition, is a team sport, but this is typified by the game that the Knicks currently play. It is not about consistent domination by a central figure. Even the most celebrated player, Jalen Brunson, depends on coordination, timing, and trust in his teammates. The drama unfolds collectively, and its outcome remains contingent on who makes a foul shot and who grabs a rebound. Participation matters—not just symbolically but materially. The arena amplifies the idea, however imperfectly enacted, that communal engagement shapes outcomes. And these outcomes transcended the arenas where the Knicks games were played, stimulating joy and collective actions, and bringing people together in the desire for a common outcome.
By contrast, the spectacle of an Ultimate Fighting Championship event, staged in a garish steel cage, on the grounds of the White House on June 14 operated on a fundamentally different ritual logic. It was not designed for mutual participation but for spectacle: with the concentration of attention onto a staged center, where one-on-one conflict and mayhem are distilled into physical dominance and symbolic submission. The audience’s role is not to join but to witness—to be awed, to see blood and hear pain, be unsettled, and ultimately to orient themselves toward the figures who command the stage and oversee the event.
The choice of venue was not incidental. The White House has long functioned as a site of state ritual. But traditionally, those rituals—press briefings, public ceremonies, even contentious protests beyond its gates—are tethered, at least aspirationally, to norms of decorum, accountability, and public engagement. Introducing a choreographed combat spectacle into that space shifts its symbolic significance. It recasts a locus of governance into an arena of performance, where the aesthetic of dominance and self-promotion, by a small network of cronies, overshadows any ethical prospect of leading to wider participation.
This is precisely the distinction our comparative work on governance and ritual helps illuminate. When power is broadly distributed, rituals tend to be inclusive, iterative, and co-constructed. They require participants to see one another as collaborators in a shared process, even when competition is involved. In contrast, when power is tightly concentrated, rituals often become spectacles—staged experiences that reinforce hierarchy, channel emotions toward a focal point, and reduce the audience to spectators instead of actors. The Knicks, for all the commercialism of modern sports, still lean toward the former model. Their playoff games invited identification not with an owner but with a collective—however abstract—called a team, a city, a fan base. Victory was widely shared across an entire metropolitan area, communally. The ritual binds laterally, person-to-person.
A UFC spectacle staged in the orbit of political power points in the other direction. It binds vertically. The emotional energy of the crowd is drawn upward and inward, toward a center that is insulated from participation. The unpredictability of sport is replaced by an orchestrated spectacle; even the violence, ostensibly raw, is framed and contained to produce maximum symbolic effect. None of this is to suggest that one form of ritual is wholly virtuous and the other entirely malign. Spectacle has always been part of human societies, and participatory rituals can exclude to the same extent as they can include. Madison Square Garden is not immune to hierarchy, nor is fandom evenly accessible. But the contrast remains as glaring as instructive because it reveals not just different entertainments, but different models of how people relate to power—and to one another.
At stake is more than this season’s recreational programming. Rituals, whether ancient ball games in Mesoamerica or modern sporting events in New York, are not peripheral to political life; they are constitutive of it. They shape how individuals experience belonging, authority, and agency. They encode assumptions about who acts and who is meant to watch. The event at the White House reinforces values such as “might makes right” and life is a “zero-sum game.”
Alternatively, in an era when democratic practices often feel attenuated, the spaces where participation is still enacted—even imperfectly—carry heightened significance, thereby fostering shared aims and emphasizing the potential win-win-win outcomes that interdependence and collaborative action can generate. The roar of a crowd that believes its collective voice matters stands in quiet contrast to spectacles that ask only for attention, passivity, and allegiance.
We would do well to recognize the difference.
Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
About Gary M. Feinman Gary M. Feinman is the MacArthur curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian anthropology, at the Negaunee Integrative Research Center. View all posts by Gary M. Feinman →
Monday, June 15, 2026
Genomes from Oceania offer new clues to human evolution
A new Yale-led study provides one of the most detailed and comprehensive analyses to date of genetic variation in human populations in Oceania, filling a major gap in representation in genomics research.
Despite harboring remarkable diversity, populations in this vast region in the South Pacific historically have been overlooked in global human genetic studies, which have often focused largely on peoples of European descent, researchers say.
“The drastic underrepresentation of Oceanians limits our understanding of human evolution and could exacerbate health inequalities as genomic research is used to develop novel medical treatments” said the lead author Serena Tucci, assistant professor of anthropology in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the principal investigator of the Yale Human Evolutionary Genomics Laboratory. “To fill that gap, my research team embarked on a large-scale project to expand what is known about human genetic variation, including genetic variants inherited from extinct hominins.”
The study, published on June 11 in the journal Science, shows how the genes that ancient humans acquired after mating with extinct hominins continue to shape the biology, health, and survival of our species today.
For the study, the research team sequenced the genomes of 177 individuals across 12 distinct populations in different parts of Near Oceania — the southwestern portion of the Pacific region that includes Papua New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands — and analyzed them alongside a massive dataset of 1,284 previously published genomes from individuals worldwide.
By tracing the deep history of the Pacific’s earliest pioneers, who migrated to the region by at least 45,000 years ago, the researchers uncovered unprecedented insights into human evolutionary history and adaptation. For example, they discovered that ancestors of Near Oceanic populations mated with at least three distinct groups related to Denisovans — an enigmatic hominin group initially discovered from fossil fragments in Siberia.
“Previous studies showed that DNA inherited from extinct hominins, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, survives, scattered, in the genomes of present-day human populations” Tucci said. “With this study we have moved beyond simply ‘resurrecting’ this DNA to showing how it actively turns genes on and off, which is game-changing. This DNA is not just a remnant of ancient liaisons; it continues to influence our biology today.”
Mating between ancient humans and Denisovans left a legacy of many genetic variants, including some that contribute to functions in present-day humans, the researcher said.
For the new study, the researchers used an advanced functional genomic technique known as a “massively parallel reporter assay” to physically test the functional consequences of these genetic variants and identified over 3,100 that alter gene expression. This analysis provided some of the largest-scale evidence for how specific, adaptive genetic variants inherited from Denisovans function inside humans today, the researchers say.
They found that a substantial proportion of these adaptive and functional variants affected the interferon-gamma signaling pathway, a vital component of the human immune system that defends against infectious pathogens.
“DNA from extinct hominins — Denisovans and Neanderthals — helped facilitate human adaptation to diverse environments that people encountered as they migrated into this region of the world,” said Patrick Reilly, first author of the study and associate research scientist in the Yale Human Evolutionary Genomics Laboratory in the Department of Anthropology. “Pathogens are one of the strongest selective pressures — environmental factors that affect our ability to survive — throughout human evolution. We find evidence that genes inherited from Denisovans bolstered immunity to viruses and bacteria ancient humans encountered in Near Oceania.”
The study also revealed that Denisovan DNA influences skeletal development. The researchers discovered adaptive variants inherited from Denisovans in a specific gene called TRPS1. This same gene has been under strong positive selection in central African rainforest hunter-gatherers and highland populations in Ecuador, showing how evolution can result in recurrent local adaptations in different regions of the world.
“While Denisovans vanished from the Earth thousands of years ago, this research proves that our histories remain deeply intertwined,” Tucci said.
Coauthors of the study include Daniela Tejada-Martinez, Samantha L. Miller, Audrey Tjahjadi, Chang Liu, and Alysa Pomer of the Yale Human Evolutionary Genomics Laboratory; Stephen Rong, Jared Akers, Margaret E. Prentice, and Steven K. Reilly of Yale School of Medicine; D. Andrew Merriwether of Binghamton University; Françoise R. Friedlaender and Jonathan S. Friedlaender of Temple University; and George Koki of Papua New Guinea Institute for Medical Research.
The research was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Human Genome Research Institute of the National Institutes of Health.
Long-term isolation and archaic introgression shape functional genetic variation in Near Oceania
Article Publication Date
11-Jun-2026
Tuesday, January 13, 2026
Fossils discovered in Morocco shed light on our African roots
Paris (AFP) – Where did our species first emerge? Fossils discovered in Morocco dating back more than 773,000 years bolster the theory that Homo sapiens originally appeared in Africa, scientists said in a study this week.
The oldest Homo sapien fossils, dating from over 300,000 years ago, were found at the Jebel Irhoud northwest of Marrakesh.
Our cousins the Neanderthals mostly lived in Europe, while more recent additions to the family, the Denisovans, roamed Asia.
This has prompted an enduring mystery: who was the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and our cousins, before the family tree split off into different branches?
This divergence is thought to have occurred between 550,000 and 750,000 years ago.
Until now, the main hominin fossils from around that time period were found in Atapuerca, Spain.
They belonged to a species dubbed "Homo antecessor", dated back around 800,000 years ago, and had features that were a mix of the older Homo erectus and those more similar to Homo sapiens and our cousins.
This sparked a contentious debate about whether our species originally emerged outside of Africa, before returning there.
There was "a gap in the fossil record of Africa", French paleoanthropologist and lead study author Jean-Jacques Hublin told the French news agency AFP.
The research published in the journal Nature fills that gap by finally establishing a firm date for fossils discovered in 1969 inside a cave in the Moroccan city of Casablanca.
Over three decades, a French-Moroccan team unearthed hominin vertebrae, teeth and fragments of jaws that have puzzled researchers.
A slender lower jawbone discovered in 2008 proved particularly perplexing.
"Hominins who lived half a million or a million years generally didn't have small jawbones," Hublin said.
"We could clearly see that it was something unusual – and we wondered how old it could be."
However numerous efforts to determine its age fell short.
When Earth's magnetic field flipped
Then the researchers tried a different approach.
Every once in a while, Earth's magnetic field flips. Until the last reversal – 773,000 years ago – our planet's magnetic north pole was near the geographic south pole.
Evidence of this change is still preserved in rocks around the world.
The Casablanca fossils were discovered in layers corresponding to the time of this reversal, allowing scientists to establish a "very, very precise" date, Hublin said.
This discovery eliminates the "absence of plausible ancestors" for Homo sapiens in Africa, he added.
Antonio Rosas, a researcher at Spain's National Museum of Natural Sciences, said it adds "weight to the increasingly prevalent idea" that the origins of both our species and the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals/Denisovans lie in Africa.
"This work also suggests that the evolutionary divergence of the Homo sapiens lineage might have started earlier than is conventionally assumed," Rosas, who was not involved in the research, commented in Nature.
Like Homo antecessor, the Casablanca fossils have a mix of characteristics from Homo erectus, ourselves and our cousins.
But while clearly closely related, the Moroccan and Spanish fossils are not the same, which Hublin said is a sign of "populations that are in the process of separating and differentiating".
The Middle East is considered to have been the main migration route for hominins out of Africa, however sinking sea levels at certain times could have allowed crossings between Tunisia and Sicily – or across the Strait of Gibraltar.
So the Casablanca fossils are "another piece of evidence to support the hypothesis of possible exchanges" between North Africa and southwestern Europe, Hublin said.
Thursday, January 08, 2026
The Bright Side: Fossils found in Morocco shed light on humanity's African roots
Fossils of archaic humans found in a cave in Casablanca are helping to fill a gap in the history of humanity's evolutionary lineage, with researchers saying they may represent a population that existed shortly before Homo sapiens populated Africa.
Fossilised bones and teeth dating to 773,000 years ago, unearthed in a Moroccan cave, are providing a deeper understanding of the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa, representing the remains of archaic humans who may have been close ancestors of our species.
Researchers said the fossils – lower jawbones of two adults and a toddler, as well as teeth, a thigh bone and some vertebrae – were unearthed in a cave called Grotte à Hominidés at a site in the city of Casablanca. The cave appears to have been a den for predators, with the thigh bone bearing bite marks suggesting the person may have been hunted or scavenged by a hyena.
The researchers said the most appropriate interpretation is that these fossils represent an evolved form of the archaic human species Homo erectus, which first appeared about 1.9 million years ago in Africa and later spread to Eurasia.
The bones and teeth display a mix of primitive and more modern human characteristics. They fill a gap in the African fossil record of species in the human evolutionary lineage – called hominins – from about one million to 600,000 years ago.
According to the researchers, the fossils may represent an African population that existed shortly before the evolutionary split of the lineages that led to Homo sapiens in Africa and two closely related hominins – the Neanderthals and Denisovans – that inhabited Eurasia.
"I would be cautious about labeling them as 'the last common ancestor', but they are plausibly close to the populations from which later African – Homo sapiens – and Eurasian – Neanderthal and Denisovan – lineages ultimately emerged," said paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of Collège de France in Paris and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, lead author of the study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"The fossils show a mosaic of primitive and derived traits, consistent with evolutionary differentiation already underway during this period, while reinforcing a deep African ancestry for the Homo sapiens lineage," Hublin added.
The oldest-known fossils of Homo sapiens, dating to about 315,000 years ago, were also found in Morocco, at an archaeological site called Jebel Irhoud.
Knowing the age of the Grotte à Hominidés fossils, based on the magnetic signature of cave sediments surrounding the fossils, helped the researchers assess how this population fit into the human family tree.
"Establishing the age was essential to the interpretation of this material," Hublin added.
The fossils were buried by fine sediments over time and the cave entrance was sealed by a dune, enabling exceptional preservation of the remains. Hundreds of stone artefacts and thousands of animal bones were also discovered in the cave.
The Grotte à Hominidés human fossils are roughly the same age as fossils from a site called Gran Dolina near Atapuerca in Spain that represent an archaic human species called Homo antecessor. In fact, these fossils share some traits.
"The similarities between Gran Dolina and Grotte à Hominidés are intriguing and may reflect intermittent connections across the Strait of Gibraltar, a hypothesis that deserves further investigation," Hublin said.
Hominins from this time possessed body proportions similar to ours but with smaller brains.
The jawbone, or mandible, of the Grotte à Hominidés child, who was about 1-1/2 years old, was complete, while the mandible of one of the adults was nearly complete and the other was partial. One of the adult jawbones was built more robustly than the other, suggesting one was from a man and the other from a woman. The largest of the fossils was the adult thigh bone, or femur.
These people were capable of hunting prey but roamed a dangerous landscape and sometimes found themselves as the hunted, with large carnivores, including big cats and hyenas, on the prowl.
"Only the femur displays clear evidence of carnivore modification – gnawing and tooth marks – indicating consumption by a large carnivore. However, the cave appears primarily to have been a carnivore den that hominins used only occasionally. The absence of tooth marks on the mandibles does not imply that other parts of the bodies were not consumed by hyenas or other carnivores," Hublin said.
(FRANCE 24 with Reuters)
Wednesday, December 03, 2025
Becoming human in southern Africa: What ancient hunter-gatherer genomes reveal
Mandible of a hunter-gatherer woman who lived 7900 years ago at Matjes River Rockshelter in the Western Cape, South Africa, for whom a genome was reconstructed.
In one of the largest African hunter-gatherer ancient-DNA studies to date, population geneticists from Uppsala University in Sweden, and a cognitive archaeologist from the University of Johannesburg, South Africa, analysed the DNA of 28 people who lived in southern Africa between 1200 and just a few hundred years ago. It contributes further evidence that southern African hunter-gatherers were some of the earliest human groups with a unique Homo sapiens genetic ancestry tracing back to about 300 000 years ago.
This could be done by peering behind the veil of recent migrations, providing a direct window into the region’s population history before large-scale movements that reshaped the continent's genetic landscape.
Some sapiens-specific adaptations from southern Africa
They found 490 modern human or Homo sapiens specific genetic variants in the ancient southern African hunter-gatherers. Amongst these, immune-system related genes and genes related to kidney function were prevalent.
“When we examine all human genetic variation and look for evolutionary changes on the Homo sapiens lineage, we surprisingly find adaptations of kidney-functions as one of the most dramatic changes. This adaptation may be related to human’s specific water-retention and body-cooling system, which give us special endurance”, says population geneticist Mattias Jakobsson.
Three variants – not specific to all humans, but to the ancient southern Africans – were also located in genes associated with UV-light protection, skin-diseases, and/or skin-pigmentation. Different from the rainforests of central Africa, southern African’s more open ecologies with little natural shade, likely made it important for human foragers to develop UV-light protection genetically.
Most genes have many different functions, and akin to immunity and UV-light protection traits, some behavioural and cognitive traits are also largely heritable. It is therefore noteworthy that more than 40% of the Homosapiens-specific genetic variants found in the ancient southern African hunter-gatherers are also associated with neurons for brain growth and cognitive traits, or the way that human brains process information today.
Out of southern Africa
Southern Africa may have been an ecological refuge for humans since a cold phase almost 200 000 years ago. Here hunter-gatherers thrived, adapting to a diverse landscape rich in plant and animal resources.
It seems that these southern hunter-gatherers did not mix again with other Africans until after 1400 years ago. By that time, the DNA from eastern African pastoralists, and western African farmers became apparent in southern African populations.
The results from this new study differ from previous linguistic, archaeological, and some early genetic studies, that saw contemporary southern African Khoe and San as the descendants of a once-widespread population that extended across much of southern, eastern, and northeastern Africa.
Instead, it shows that some genetic adaptations for becoming human in Africa were unique to southern African hunter-gatherers who lived in a relatively large, stable population for many millennia south of the Limpopo River.
After about 100-70 000 years ago, small groups of southern African hunter-gatherers may have wandered northwards, carrying several of their genetic signatures and perhaps also techno-behaviours with them.
For Stone Age and cognitive archaeologist from the University of Johannesburg, Marlize Lombard, “this is a meaningful outcome, suggesting that the complex thinking and techno-behaviours such as making compound adhesives or bowhunting, observed in the southern African archaeological record from about 100 000 years ago originated locally, probably trickling northward with the genes of local hunter-gatherers from about 70 000 years ago”.
Are the descendants of ancient hunter-gatherers still among us?
From the Limpopo Province in the north to the south coast of the Western Cape, and from Ballito Bay in KwaZulu-Natal to Augrabies in the Northern Cape, these ancient people almost all shared genetic markers (such as the mitochondrial L0d haplogroup) that are inherited from a single maternal ancestor.
These markers are still found in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly in San or Bushman people such as the Ju/’hoan in Namibia and Botswana, and the Karretjie Mense of South Africa. To a lesser extent the markers are also present in the Coloured population of South Africa, as well as in some Afrikaans speaking south Africans of European descent (mostly French and Dutch), who started to live in the Cape during the 17th century.
Many of the people currently living in South Africa are therefore the descendants of the original hunter-gatherer population to a greater or lesser degree.
Early population history
What excites co-author, Carina Schlebush, most: “is that these genomes provide an unadmixed view of early southern African population history. With increasing numbers of high-coverage ancient genomes, we are now approaching true population-level insights. This gives us a much clearer foundation for understanding how modern humans evolved across Africa”.
Researchers do not yet understand everything that contributed to becoming human in southern Africa, or elsewhere.
The genomes of ancient southern African hunter-gatherers as one of the earliest Homosapiens groups to split from a common ancestor, however, has a lot to offer. It shows, amongst other things, that genetic variation may still be hidden in other ancient African forager groups, as well as indigenous peoples from elsewhere on the globe for whom there are little available genetic data. Such data is important for advancing our understanding of human evolution.
For lead-author Mattias Jakobsson: “These ancient genomes tell us that southern Africa played a key role in the human journey, perhaps ‘the’ key role”.
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Notes to Editors
For email questions about this research, please contact Prof Marlize Lombard on Wed 3 Dec or Thurs 4 Dec at mlombard@uj.ac.za. News release written by Prof Marlize Lombard.
Funding
This project was funded by grants from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation (to Mattias Jakobsson and to Carina Schlebush), the Swedish Research council (grant 2022-04642 to Mattias Jakobsson, grant 2023-02944 to Carina Schlebush) and South African National Research Foundation (African Origins Platform grant 98815 to Marlize Lombard).
Acknowledgements
Sequencing was performed at the SciLifeLab SNP&SEQ Technology Platform in Uppsala and the computations and data handling were enabled by resources provided by the National Academic Infrastructure for Supercomputing in Sweden (NAISS) at UPPMAX.
Sampling permits were obtained from the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA). We thank the staff at Bloemfontein Museum, the Florisbad Research Station and the School of Anatomical Sciences and Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand for facilitating work with the collections; the members of the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA) and the South African San Council for their support and facilitating fieldwork for the collections that involved modern-day Khoe-San groups published previously, also used in this study. We thank our brilliant and long-term collaborator and co-author J. Brink who sadly passed away during the course of this project.
300,000-year old Homo sapiens genetic ancestry traced back to Southern African hunter-gatherers
Mandible of a hunter-gatherer woman who lived 7900 years ago at Matjes River Rockshelter in the Western Cape, South Africa, for whom a genome was reconstructed.
Credit
Photo by Helena Malmström.
At a rock shelter 540km east of Cape Town, researchers traced back some of the earliest Homo sapiens genetic ancestry
The Matjes River Rockshelter in the Western Cape, South Africa, 540 km east of Cape Town. Eight people who lived here between 10,200 and 3000 years ago contributed DNA to this study.
Helena Malmström, Researcher at Department of Organismal Biology, Uppsala University, sampling at the Florisbad research station using the mobile clean lab.
In southern Africa, a group of people lived in partial isolation for hundreds of thousands of years. This is shown in a new study based on analyses of the genomes of 28 people who lived between 10,200 and 150 years ago in southern Africa. The researchers also found genetic adaptations that likely shaped Homo sapiens as a species. The study, which is the largest to date of African ancient DNA, is published in Nature.
Homo sapiens has been around for at least 300,000 years. But exactly where on the African continent our species originated has not been known. According to some theories, Homo sapiens evolved in eastern Africa and only spread southwards around 50,000 years ago. A new study by researchers at Uppsala University and the University of Johannesburg shows that this assumption is wrong.
“We have long known that southern Africa was inhabited, but it was previously unclear whether these inhabitants were just predecessors of ours or whether they were Homo sapiens. We can now show that Homo sapiens have existed and evolved in southern Africa for a long time. This area has played an important role in human evolution, perhaps the most important of all,” says Mattias Jakobsson, who led the study and is a professor of genetics at Uppsala University.
Analysed DNA from 28 individuals
The study is based on analyses of the genomes of 28 individuals who lived in southern Africa between 10,200 and 150 years ago. When the researchers compared the genomes of the Stone Age people of southern Africa with the genomes of modern and Stone Age people from all other parts of the world, they found that the Stone Age people of southern Africa had lived in isolation for a very long time.
“This group seems to have been genetically separate for at least 200,000 years. It’s only relatively late, around 1,400 years ago, that we see clear traces of gene flow into this group when DNA from individuals from East Africa and West Africa begins to become visible in individuals in southern Africa,” says Jakobsson.
Although no new groups migrated to southern Africa earlier than about 1,400 years ago, genetic data suggest that members of the southern population migrated north during favourable climatic periods. Around 8,000 years ago, there is genetic material from the southern population in individuals in present-day Malawi, and it is possible that such expansions from the south also occurred earlier.
Tools changed, even though no new people migrated in
A large proportion of the human remains analysed have been found at the Matjes River Rock Shelter, a protective rock formation on the south coast of South Africa. The site contains five clearly defined archaeological layers representing different cultural-historical periods from around 10,000 years ago to around 1,500 years ago. Archaeological analysis shows that tools change between the layers and that each period has its own technique for making tools.
“Despite this, the individuals are genetically virtually identical over the entire time period. There is no evidence of in-migration or population exchange. This differs from the picture in Europe, for example, where cultural shifts often coincide with new people moving in,” says Jakobsson.
Genetic changes specific to Homo sapiens
In the study, the researchers identified 79 DNA variants that alter gene function and are unique to Homo sapiens, i.e. genetic variants different from those found in Neanderthals and Denisovans, chimpanzees and gorillas. Moreover, all analysed living and prehistoric Homo sapiens carry the same variant.
“The genomes of the prehistoric individuals of southern Africa are invaluable in this context, as they carry a large number of genetic variants that have been lost in other groups. One way to look at it is that the prehistoric population of southern Africa contains half of all human genetic variation, with all other groups, including people from western and eastern Africa and people outside Africa, containing the other half. Consequently, these genomes help us to see which genetic variants were really important for human evolution,” says Jakobsson.
Among these, there were seven genetic variants linked to kidney functions. At first sight, this surprised the researchers as they expected to mainly find genes related to the immune system and cognitive functions. Such variants were also found, but gene variants affecting kidney function were clearly over-represented.
“One hypothesis is that these gene variants are linked to the unique human ability to cool the body by sweating, which requires a good ability to control fluid balance in the body. It’s possible that precisely these changes in genes that affect the morphology and function of the kidney gave our predecessors unique properties for regulating fluid balance, thereby increasing their cooling and endurance abilities – properties that Neanderthals and Denisovans lacked,” says Jakobsson.
In addition to these variants, the researchers found changes in genes involved in both the immune system and neuron growth, which may affect brain growth and complex cognitive functions. More than 40 per cent of these variants are associated with neurons and brain growth, suggesting a role in cognitive evolution. Several genes have been linked to attention – a mental ability that may have evolved differently in Homo sapiens compared with Neanderthals and Denisovans.
“One of the most meaningful outcomes of the study is that it suggests that the complex behaviours and thinking observed in the southern African archaeological record from about 100 000 years ago originated locally, and may have subsequently trickled northward with the genes and technologies of local hunter-gatherers,” says Marlize Lombard, an archaeologist specialising in the Middle Stone Age and cognitive archaeology at the University of Johannesburg, who is one of the authors of the study.
Genetic material still present in modern San populations
Around 80 per cent of the genetic material is still present in modern San populations, such as the Ju/’hoansi in Namibia and Botswana, and the Karretjie people in South Africa. Thus, in contrast to previous theories, which proposed that modern-day Khoe-San peoples are descended from a widely distributed population existing across much of Africa, the results show that southern Africa’s prehistoric hunter-gatherers were isolated in the south, but nevertheless comprised a large and stable population.
“What pleases me most is that these genomes give a very clear picture of the early population history of southern Africa. As we obtain more and more high-quality ancient genomes, we are now beginning, for the first time, to gain insights at a genuine population level. This gives us a much clearer basis for understanding how modern humans evolved on the African continent,” says Carina Schlebusch, Professor of Human Evolution and Genetics at Uppsala University and one of the study’s authors.
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