AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINES CARRY
THE DNA OF AN UNKNOWN “HUMAN” SPECIES IVAN
New research has revealed
fascinating details about Aboriginal Australians and Pacific Islanders, who
according to experts, carry genetic material of an unknown human species.
The new research suggests,
people from Papua New Guinea and Northeast Australia, have traces of DNA
belonging to an unidentified, extinct human species.
Apparently, there is still
much that geneticists and scientists do not understand about this crucial
moment in human history, and it seems that research on the subject is raising
more questions than answers.
In 2016, researchers at
Harvard Medical School published the findings of a comprehensive study of the
human genome of all areas of the world and discovered something astounding
about the Australian aboriginal population.
They appear to have genetic
markers that indicate they are descendants of a yet unidentified human species.
“We’re missing a population, or we’re misunderstanding something about
the relationships,” Ryan Bohlender,
a Statistical Geneticist at the University of Texas, told Tina Hesman Saey at Science News.
Bohlender and his
colleagues have been researching the amount of extinct hominid DNA that modern
humans still carry today.
To the surprise of many,
they say they’ve found discrepancies in previous studies that suggest our
mingling with Neanderthals and Denisovans isn’t the entire evolutionary story.
“Who this unknown group is we don’t know.”
It’s believed that between
100,000 and 60,000 years ago, our ancestors migrated out of Africa, making
contact with other hominid species inhabiting the Eurasian landmass.
Experts believe that this
contact left a mark on our species that is still present today.
“Our main goal is to understand how our race got to the point where it
is, but in order to do that, we must first study the DNA of the ancient tribes,”
explained Mallick Swapan, leading Scientist
of the study, and an expert who has been studying the origins of the human
genome for most of his career.
He explained that the new
study gathered the genetic data of 142 different human populations scattered
around the world that was underrepresented in Large-Scale Studies so far.
According to Swapan, the most incredible revelation
of this new study is that the Genetic Code of the Australian Aborigines shows
that they carry the DNA markers that indicate the ancient crossbred with an
unknown “human” species.
Although it was initially
suspected that unusual DNA markers might indicate that Aboriginal Ancestors interbred
with the elusive ancient species known as Denisovans, this hypothesis turned
out to be incorrect.
After the analysis,
scientists discovered that DNA markers were distinct from Denisovan markers,
leading them to the conclusion that they had found traces of an entirely new
form of ancient human species.
It is known that the native
peoples of Australia are descendants of the first people who came to the
continent from Africa about 50,000 years ago.
It has been assumed that
aborigines were isolated from the rest of the world for thousands of years and
therefore scientists thought that their genetic code would be relatively
homogeneous.
Surprisingly, this turned
out, not to be the case.
“The Genetic Signatures of
an Australian Aboriginal from eastern Australia and western Australia are as
different as those of a person from Europe and an Asian person,” Swapan said.
The incredible diversity in
the Genetic Code of the Native Peoples of Australia, in addition to the
peculiar genetic marker that indicates that they interbred with an unknown
human species in the past, indicates that there is still much more to discover
about the ancient history of humanity.
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