Overview
- The study published July 30 applies TRACE to roughly 500 high‑coverage modern genomes and reports computational evidence for previously undetected archaic introgression.
- Researchers say one unidentified “ghost” lineage contributed about 0.5 to 1 percent of each person’s genome and left segments in every population studied.
- A separate “super‑archaic” lineage that diverged roughly 1.8 million years ago appears indirectly in Oceanian genomes through Denisovan ancestry.
- TRACE recovered known Neanderthal and Denisovan segments in validation tests and showed low false‑positive rates, but the taxonomic identities of the new lineages remain tentative and need independent confirmation.
- The findings change how scientists view human evolution by showing multiple waves of interbreeding and by revealing archaic DNA in regions tied to immunity, metabolism, and even the FOXP2 region linked to speech.