SOLONESHNOYE, Russia — Wood smoke hangs like a mist over this town, nestled in a valley deep in Siberia. The log houses lean at jaunty angles, dogs bark in the yards and cows, their neck bells clanging, walk the dusty streets.

At once picturesque and poor, Soloneshnoye, like so much of rural Russia, was passed over by the oil boom and bust of faraway Moscow.

But for all its woes, the town may have found its ticket in another form of fossil fuel: human prehistory, linked to discoveries of ancient bones in the area.

In an emerging model of evolution, widely supported by scientists, different types of early humans, including Neanderthals, interbred and left their genetic traces with many of us today. It is a theory known in the scientific literature as “admixture between archaic and anatomically modern humans.”