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)
A prehistoric cave found near Foreidis in northern Israel is offering a rare glimpse into a little-known phase of human evolution. Sealed for hundreds of thousands of years, the site preserves tools, animal remains and evidence of prolonged occupation.
Archaeologists seldom encounter a site that has remained virtually untouched by natural and human interference for hundreds of thousands of years.
That is precisely what has been found in a cave on the outskirts of Foreidis, near the Zichron Yaakov junction, where researchers from the Israel Antiquities Authority and the University of Haifa are excavating a site dated to between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago.
The excavation is led (source in Spanish) by archaeologist Kobi Vardi and Amit Gabay, together with Professor Ron Schimmelmitz. The team describe the site as one of the most significant discoveries of recent decades for understanding a stage in human evolution for which very little evidence has been preserved.
The cave is associated with the so‑called Acheulo-Yabrudian culture, a technological tradition characteristic of the Levant during the late Lower Palaeolithic. According to the researchers, its exceptional state of preservation makes it a genuine “time capsule” capable of yielding information that is difficult to obtain at other sites in the region.
Inside the Foreidis cave during excavation Emil Aljam - Israel Antiquities Authority
A decisive moment in the history of our species
The period to which the site belongs predates the spread of Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. Specialists view it as a time of profound change in ways of living, relating to one another and adapting to the environment.
According to Schimmelmitz, during these millennia behaviours began to emerge that would later become commonplace among human populations. These include the formation of larger groups, the long-term occupation of specific places and a more complex social organisation.
The evidence recovered also points to an intensive use of fire and to relatively long stays in caves, something usually associated with greater cooperation between individuals and the systematic transmission of knowledge within communities.
The researchers believe that these changes laid some of the cultural and technological foundations that would later characterise Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.
Tools, animals and a landscape rich in resources
Among the finds already documented are numerous flint tools produced using techniques that were advanced for the time. Archaeologists have identified small hand axes, scrapers and cutting blades made with great precision.
From right to left: researchers Prof Ron Schimmelmitz of the University of Haifa, Dr Kobi Vardi and Amit Gabay of the Israel Antiquities Authority. Emil Aljam - Israel Antiquities Authoritiy
The excavation has also brought to light animal bones from species such as horses, deer and wild asses. Alongside them were traces indicating the presence of water in the surrounding area, a resource that would have made the site particularly attractive to groups of hunter-gatherers.
Vardi compares the scientific importance of the discovery to that of the renowned Nahal Me'arot site (source in Spanish), designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site and also crucial for the study of prehistory in the Levant.
The Israel Antiquities Authority and the University of Haifa plan to develop an extensive research programme to reconstruct in greater detail how these human groups lived, how they exploited the resources available to them and how their technologies evolved.
Once the studies have been completed, the institutions involved hope to prepare the site for public visits, with the aim of bringing these discoveries closer both to local residents and to students and visitors interested in human evolution.
Sunday, June 28, 2026
First-ever protein analysis of Homo naledi fossils finds zero male markers
New analysis of the South African's Rising Star Cave fossils reveals striking genetic singularity, hinting at first known example of a sex-specific burial site from a non-human species
National Geographic Explorer and biological anthropologist Keneiloe Molopyane studying the excavation pit. Molopyane was one of the members of the all-female ‘underground astronauts’ who helped excavate Homo naledi fossils.
An international team of researchers successfully extracted and analysed the first-ever protein fragments from fossil teeth of Homo naledi, an extinct human relative found in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, South Africa.
In a study published today in Cell, scientists from the University of Copenhagen, the University of the Witwatersrand, the National Geographic Society’s Rising Star project and 13 collaborating global institutions found no signs of any biological males within the group of Homo naledi remains tested, offering intriguing insights into potential cultural behaviours that may have existed before Homo sapiens.
The analysis examined 23 teeth representing at least 20 Homo naledi individuals. To determine the biological sex of each individual, researchers looked for Amelogenin-Y – a protein that is uniquely coded onto the male Y chromosome – within the tooth enamel. Thorough examination of ancient proteins from the enamel of 23 Homo naledi teethrevealed a complete absence of the marker, indicating a strong likelihood that each individual discovered in the Rising Star Cave system was biologically female. Among hominins, like all other mammals, females typically exhibit two X chromosomes and males carry an X and a Y chromosome. Because only males have a Y chromosome, finding amelogenin-Y tells researchers with certainty that the tooth belonged to a male.
“Unlike those found in other remains like bone fragments, proteins in tooth enamel are preserved because dental enamel – the hardest tissue in the human body – shields proteins from environmental contamination even for millions of years. This makes them ideal carriers of genetic information from deep time,” said South African-born scientist and lead study author Palesa Madupe. Madupe is a molecular scientist who was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen at the time of the study and currently a researcher at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany. “Our study helps resolve the long-standing mystery of why Homo naledi lacked significant variation; it’s probably because they could have all belonged to one sex.”
As the largest extinct hominin population to ever be examined using ancient protein analysis, the findings raise new questions about the biology, evolution, culture, and potential mortuary practices of Homo naledi.
When the Wits University team first discovered and excavated the Homo naledi remains in 2013, they noticed something puzzling — the adult fossils found in the Dinaledi Chamber were all very similar. The adult fossils had very little variation in size, shape, and other physical traits. Typically, some variation is expected among hominins, especially among males and females, otherwise known as sexual dimorphism.
To investigate this anomaly, researchers applied a minimally destructive acid etching technique to carefully extract fragments of ancient proteins — called peptides — from the remains. The peptide samples were then analyzed with a mass spectrometer to identify all of the proteins present in the remains, including amelogenin — a process called paleoproteomic analysis.
“It appears that the most likely explanation for the observed absence of an Amelogenin-Y marker in these individuals is that we are seeing a sex-bias in mortuary practice — a practice until now only observed in contemporary human cultures,” said National Geographic Explorer in Residence and corresponding author of the study Lee Berger, who is still and Honorary Professor at Wits University. “The chance of having sampled twenty individuals and they are all from one sex, is quite literally one in a million.”
First described by Berger and colleagues from the Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star cave system, Homo naledi is an extinct hominin species with a combination of human-like and pre-human-like features that lived between 335,000 and 241,000 years ago. Fueled by a curiosity that reaches deep into millennia-old cave systems, an all-female team of “underground astronauts” in 2013 excavated more than 1,500 fossils and 150 hominin teeth — the largest ever discovered on the continent of Africa — which at the time represented at least 15 individuals. Later, this number grew as more fossils were found by the Rising Star team in this and other areas of the cave. Wits University is the custodian of the Homo naledi fossils.
The results of this study build upon previous insights from the Rising Star team about Homo naledi’s purported behavior. In 2023, the Rising Star team discovered evidence of possibleHomo naledi fire, symbols, and burials and in 2025, the team published additional evidence to support their findings of intentional burial practices and the creation of rock engravings.
“There are many past human societies with sex-specific burial practices, but we’ve found very little hard evidence of this from the earliest burial sites of modern humans or Neanderthals,” said John Hawks, a co-author of the paper and member of the Rising Star team. “These remains of Homo naledi are older than any known Neanderthal or modern human burial site, and it’s remarkable to see that they may all be female.”
Still, the research team acknowledges in this work that there could be another reason for the absence of male markers in the tested Homo naledi remains: the Amelogenin-Y gene may have mutated or have been deleted over time.
“While the deletion of the entire AMELY gene has already been observed in extant male humans and even in the DNA of a Neanderthal male, it’s very unlikely that this would be the case among even half of the 20 individuals we studied or for an entire population,” explained Enrico Cappellini, professor of paleoproteomics at the Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, where the analytical work took place, and senior and corresponding author of the study. “Either scenario, namely the absence of H. naledi males in the Rising Star cave system or a systematic deletion of their AMELY gene, is fascinating and would have deep implications for a better understanding of the biology and evolution of this species.”
This finding is particularly significant because Homo naledi is anatomically distinct from modern humans, possessing a brain size only slightly larger than that of a chimpanzee, the authors said. Despite this smaller cranial capacity, a growing body of research suggests the species appears to have engaged in practices once considered uniquely human.
“Seeking to understand where we come from is truly core to the human experience. These new findings are amazing because they’re challenging us to rethink what we thought we knew about our place in human history,” said Ian Miller, chief science and innovation officer at the National Geographic Society. “What I love about the Rising Star team is their restless curiosity. They keep pushing the boundaries of paleoanthropology, and reminding us that the biggest discoveries are still yet to be made.”
The paper, “Proteomic analysis of dental enamel from 20 Homo naledi individuals shows no male markers,” was published June 24, 2026 in the journal Cell.
Learn more about Berger’s work, the discovery of Homo naledi and the Rising Star program in the new National Geographic Museum of Exploration, opening in Washington D.C. on Friday, June 26, 2026.
A fossil mandible of Homo naledi photographed during palaeoanthropological research in the Cradle of Humankind. The specimen forms part of ongoing studies into the anatomy and evolution of the extinct hominin species. Photo by Mathew Berger.
Credit
Mathew Berger
Journal
Cell
Article Publication Date
24-Jun-2026
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 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.
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.
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