More surprisingly, the ghosts of the mysterious 50,000-year-old girl have not disappeared. They still exist lurking in our own blood.
According to Science Alert , a team of scientists from Pompeu Fabra University (Spain) and Tartu University in Estonia used AI (artificial intelligence) to analyze a "tangled mess" in the prehistoric bloodline of humans and found a previously unknown "ghost" ancestor.
That is the ancient human species represented by a famous fossil - a "teenage" girl found in Denisova Cave , Siberia - Russia in 2018. At the time of discovery, the young girl with fossilized remains in good condition stunned the scientific community because she had characteristics similar to both Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Denisova Cave in Siberia - Russia - (Photo: Discover Magazine)
Neanderthals and Denisovans are two species of humans that became extinct about 30,000-40,000 years ago, belonging to the same genus Homo as our species Homo sapiens (wise man). The mixed-race girl in Russia was once speculated to be the direct child of a mixed marriage between Neanderthals and Denisovans.
But the new discovery suggests she may have belonged to a species of ghosts – literal ghosts, since they no longer exist in person, but have left traces in the DNA of present-day Eurasians.
In the new study, scientists used a technique called Bayesian inference to find evidence of a 'third invasion' of our species, Homo sapiens. Many modern Europeans and Asians are descended from these ghostly hybrids.
As we know, our bloodline is no longer pure but has mixed with two ancient species, Neanderthals and Denisovans, through a series of interracial marriages. However, thanks to complex algorithms to filter a complex mass of ancient and modern human genetic code that only artificial brains can do, a "third lover" has emerged.
This ghostly human is a species that has never been recorded in the fossil record - evolutionary paleoanthropology. "They are related to the Neanderthals and Denisovans or split early from the Denisovans lineage" - the researchers said, also not excluding the possibility that hybrid offspring of the two species separated and formed a new species.
All the findings coincided with the anomalies in the genetic traces of the mysterious hybrid girl in Denisova Cave - Russia , suggesting that she is most likely the only representative of this ghostly human species ever found through tangible evidence.
It was definitely a separate species, one that had branched off and evolved in its own way . "When you take away the Neanderthal and Denisovan parts, there's still something in the genome that's very different," says evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit of Pompeu Fabra University.
The study was recently published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.
