Palaeontology

Scientists discover human DNA inherited from 'ghost' ancestors

By T.K. Randall
July 31, 2026

Image: AI-generated (Midjourney) While we currently know about a number of different species of archaic human, such as Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, there are believed to be several more that remain undiscovered and about which we know practically nothing.

Recently, researchers at UC Berkeley analyzed the human genome to find out more about which archaic human species we inherited some of our DNA from.

While some of these are well known, the most exciting revelation from this work was the discovery of DNA that we inherited from at least two archaic human species that we know nothing about.

In other words, these mystery 'ghost' ancestors have never been found as fossil remains - we know about their existence only through DNA analysis.What scientists have been able to determine is that one of these mysterious ancestors interbred with modern humans in Africa at least 50,000 years ago.

The lineage itself was thought to have split from modern humans around 800,000 years ago.

"Previous publications suggested that there might be ghost ancestry - ancestry from unknown archaic lineages in modern humans - but they hadn't concluded whether this unknown ancestry is present only in Africans or not, and when this introgression event happened," said study co-author Yulin Zhang.

"We were actually able to find and map genomic locations in modern humans that are from this ghost lineage and show that this ghost ancestry is in all modern humans, not only in Africans."

Source: Phys.org

Tags: Human