The scientific paparazzi who followed long-gone evolutionary celebrities this year exposed plenty of hanky-panky between early humans and closely related species. These new findings (inexplicably ignored by supermarket tabloids) raise questions about how much genetic swap-ping happened in the Homo genus tens of thousands of years ago. What's more, the mixed-up family tree is uprooting the pop-ular view that modern humans evolved in Africa and spread from there, edging out close relatives such as Neandertals. In one revealing report, an international team unveiled a largely complete genetic library extracted from the finger fossil of a Stone Age girl (SN: 9/22/12, p. 5). Her DNA suggests that she came from a small Sibe-rian population-called Denisovans-that moved through East Asia tens of thousands of years ago. Today's Papua New Guineans inherited 6 percent of their genes from Denisovans, the study found.
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