The mysterious hominids are believed to have existed with the Neanderthals

Many bloodlines around the world, particularly of south Asian descent, may actually be a bit more Denisovan — a mysterious population of hominids that lived around the same time as the Neanderthals — researchers have revealed.

The team from Harvard Medical School and University of California—Los Angeles (UCLA) has created a world map and also used comparative genomics to make predictions about where Denisovan and Neanderthal genes may be impacting modern human biology.

The analysis also proposes that modern humans interbred with Denisovans for about 100 generations. Denisovan genes can potentially be linked to a more subtle sense of smell in Papua New Guineans and high—altitude adaptions in Tibetans.

Meanwhile, Neanderthal genes found in people around the world most likely contribute to tougher skin and hair. Most non—Africans possess at least a little bit Neanderthal DNA.

“There are certain classes of genes that modern humans inherited from the archaic humans with whom they interbred, which may have helped the modern humans to adapt to the new environments in which they arrived,” explained senior author David Reich, geneticist at Harvard Medical School.

On the flip side, there was negative selection to systematically remove ancestry that may have been problematic from modern humans.

“We can document this removal over the 40,000 years since these admixtures occurred,” Reich added.

They found evidence that both Denisovan and Neanderthal ancestry has been lost from the X chromosome as well as genes expressed in the male testes.

The study’s limitation is that it relies on the current library of ancient genomes available.

“We can’t use this data to make claims about what the Denisovans or Neanderthals looked like, what they ate, or what kind of diseases they were susceptible to,” said Sankararaman, first author on the paper.IANS