Resumen de African DNA hints at mystery hominin species
Some of us carry mysterious genes that may belong to another species of early human. The finding in people from West Africa hints that primitive hominins lingered in Africa until fairly recently. Arun Durvasula and Sriram Sankararaman at the University of California, Los Angeles, devised a statistical method to identify out-of-place DNA, without needing to know the genome of the hominin it came from. The model correctly identified the known Neanderthal DNA inhuman genomes. The pair applied it to 50 Yoruba people from West Africa, who had had their DNA sequenced for the 1000 Genomes Project. On average, 8 per cent of their genome was from an archaic population. The mystery DNA wasn't Neanderthal, and didn't match modern pygmies, who might plausibly have interbred with the Yoruba.
