Investigation of admixture between Neanderthal, Denisova and Central and Southeast Asian Homo sapiens populations
Texte intégral
1A decade ago, the sequencing of Neanderthal and Denisova genomes revealed that our species, when it left Africa, admixed with these archaic hominins. Since this breakthrough, the question regarding archaic admixture has been widely explored in European, East Asian, and Oceanian populations and showing that these populations possess between 1% and 3% of their genome inherited from Neanderthals. East Asian and Oceanian populations also inherited part of their genome from Denisova. This ancestry is less than 1% in East Asian populations but reaches up to 4% in Oceanians. Yet, the extent of admixture with archaic populations remains largely unknown for Central and Southeast Asian populations despite their importance in addressing questions related to archaic admixture, particularly given their geographical proximity to East Asian and Oceanian populations. Moreover, archaic hominin fossils suspected to be Neanderthal, or Denisova were excavated in areas where present-day Central and Southeast Asian populations reside. Therefore, in this project, we investigated evidence of admixture between Neanderthals, Denisovans and the ancestors of present-day Central and continental Southeast Asian populations. We show that Central Asian populations inherited around 2.5% of their genome from Neanderthals, while Southeast Asian populations inherited around 2.7%. This gene flow appears as the result of a unique event of admixture in the ancestors of all these populations with a Neanderthal population genetically close to Neanderthal from Vindija. We also highlight that Central and Southeast Asian populations inherited a small part of their genome (less than 1%) from Denisovans. In contrast to the genetic heritage of Neanderthals, Denisovan ancestry appears to result from multiple admixture events with different Denisovan populations, each showing varying genetic distances from the Altai Denisovan genome.
Pour citer cet article
Référence électronique
Charlotte Antoine, Céline Bon, Raphaëlle Chaix, Evelyne Heyer, Romain Laurent, Florent Détroit et Bruno Toupance, « Investigation of admixture between Neanderthal, Denisova and Central and Southeast Asian Homo sapiens populations », Bulletins et mémoires de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris [En ligne], 37(S) | 2025, mis en ligne le 16 janvier 2025, consulté le 16 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/bmsap/14508 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/133nm
Haut de pageDroits d’auteur
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont susceptibles d’être soumis à des autorisations d’usage spécifiques.
Haut de page



