Scientists tested the genes of a 45,000 year-old man from Siberia -the earliest human genomes ever analyzed - and they discovered the man came from the time when both humans and Neanderthals were sharing spaces in the area, and both species were even mixing.
The 45,000 year-old man is the oldest modern human discovered outside of African continent or the Middle East.
As The Washington Post reports, scientists were able to determine the origins of the 45,000 year-old man through genome sequencing, in an attempt to get closer to the point of history when humans and Neanderthals first started interbreeding. Thanks to this new investigation, there's a much more specific date as to when this phenomenon of interbreeding species occurred: between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago.
The research paper regarding the 45,000 year-old man is called "Genome sequence of a 45,000-year-old modern human from western Siberia" and was published in the international weekly journal of science Nature. Janet Kelson, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and one of the co-authors of the paper, said that the 45,000 year-old man's femur provided genetic information comparable to what scientists know about humans today.
Before this came out, scientists had been unable to place when it had been that Neanderthals and humans had mixed, placing it in a range between 37,000 to 86,000 years ago.
However, the amount of Neanderthal ancestry found in the Siberian man (who is also called Ust'-Ishim, in honor of the region where he was discovered) is similar to that found in modern-day humans, which would suggest that the interbreeding had not only occurred at that point but it had also ended by the time Ust'-Ishim was walking the cold areas of Siberia.
Due to this, Kelson and her colleagues were able to determine from the DNA what was the time frame when the two species interbred, since it was a much more accurate time stamp thanks to being closer to the actual date. Now, it is estimated that this phenomenon happened 7,000 to 13,000 before Ust'-Ishim lived, or about 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.
