I wrote previously that at least two Neanderthal mtDNA genomes in my dataset appear to have been misclassified by the authors of the articles that analyzed the genomes in question. Specifically, it looks like the two genomes in question, are actually Denisovans, not Neanderthals. I have since been working on assembling a history of the Denisovan and Neanderthal maternal lines, having recently completed a history of the Heidelbergensis maternal line, all the way up to present day Icelandic people.

I was stuck at Neanderthal Genome 8 in my dataset, which you can find here on the NIH website. I simply could not construct a reasonable history for it using the rest of the Neanderthal genomes. However, just like the other presumably misclassified Neanderthal genomes in my dataset, the provenance file (i.e., the previous link) for Neanderthal Genome 8 also contains a qualified entry in that the “isolate” field is set to “Denisova 15”, suggesting again, that this is actually a Denisovan genome, that is somehow associated with Neanderthals. To test this hypothesis, I compared Neanderthal Genome 8 to all other genomes in my dataset to kick the tires from scratch, and I noticed that Neanderthal Genome 8 is a 98.50% match to a modern African genome from Cameroon. That same Cameroon genome, also tests as Denisovan, specifically, it is a 51.09% match to this Denisovan genome. The logical conclusion, is that Neanderthal Genome 8 was similarly misclassified, and is instead yet another Denisovan genome of African origin.

I now have very little doubt about the Out of Africa hypothesis, and specifically, I think the modern day people of Cameroon are related to the first humans, since every test I’ve come up with points to them as the ancestor of all the archaic genomes in the dataset. Since the modern day Cameroon people test as the ancestors of the archaic genomes, they are presumably even more archaic, but somehow still alive. You can read more about this here. I should be done with the complete history of the Neanderthal and Denisovan lines shortly, it’s just a lot of information and much more complicated than Heidelbergensis, which was astonishingly simple and obvious.