Nobody Cares about Pre-History

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I expect to start seeing the term "ghost lineage" pop up a lot in online paleoanthropology circles.

Everyone alive may carry DNA from a ‘ghost lineage’ of human ancestors

In a new Science study, scientists read the family tree buried inside modern genomes and turned up “ghost ancestors” in every population on Earth that no fossil records can account for.

Anatomically modern humans are just one branch of a broader family tree. The other branches—the archaic hominins, as scientists call them—include the Neanderthals, who lived across Europe and western Asia, and the Denisovans, who are known mostly from a handful of fossils found in Siberia and Tibet. These archaic lineages interbred with ancient human groups who had migrated out of Africa, which scientists can confirm by comparing rare preserved samples of their DNA with ours.

But did our direct ancestors interbreed with other long-lost hominin lineages before the first major migrations out of Africa roughly 70,000 years ago?

It seems we're getting close to answering that question.

A new video with Ella Al-Shamahi discusses this to some degree, along with other current paleoanthropological thinking, like how homo sapiens might be a "hybrid" species of very modern and semi-ancient (well, 300,000 year old) genetics. She also talks about how she recently made public her upbringing as a Missionary Creationist (!). Pretty interesting.