Recent advances in paleogenomics (the recovery and sequencing of dna from remains up to about 80,000–100,000 years old) have allowed geneticists to test a hypothesis long proposed by paleoanthropologists: that humans (homo sapiens) interbred with other hominin species, such as neanderthals (homo neanderthalensis), that some human groups encountered as they migrated out of africa. early work in paleogenomics focused on mtdna, and more recent work has assembled a complete autosomal genome sequence for neanderthals.

surprisingly, paleogenomics has also recently identified a previously unknown hominin species in asia, named denisovans. dna recovered from a single finger bone and some teeth enabled researchers to sequence the complete denisovan genome.

a comparison of the variation in mtdna and autosomal dna from neanderthals and denisovans with the variation in present-day humans from sub-saharan africa, europe, and melanesia (a region including islands in the western pacific ocean) revealed the following.

present-day human
group matches with
neanderthal mtdna? matches with
denisovan mtdna? matches with neanderthal
autosomal dna? matches with denisovan
autosomal dna?
sub-saharan africans no no no no
europeans no no yes no
melanesians no no yes yes
what does the information in the table above indicate about interbreeding between humans, neanderthals,