Nested 'DNA' of Ancestor That Mated With Humans Found
Today's humans carry the genes of an ancient, unknown ancestor, left there by hominin species intermingling perhaps a million years ago. The ancestor may have been Homo erectus, but no one knows for sure the genome of that extinct species of human has never been sequenced, said Adam Siepel, a computational biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and one of the authors of a new paper examining the relationships of ancient human ancestors.