David Reich

It's just extraordinary what's in these places.

And these are people who separated 20,000 years ago, at least, from the ancestors of East Asians and 40,000 years ago from the ancestors of West Eurasians.

And-

you know, just had the same biological, you know, cultural shared toolkit from then.

But there's just a fuse, a long fuse delay until all this stuff happens.

It's kind of like an amazing thing and we don't question it.

I think that I'm perplexed.

I don't know if we talked about it before, but I remain very, very confused about the relationships between archaic and modern humans.

We have genome sequences now from archaic humans who lived in Europe and the West Eurasia and Central Eurasia and the Neanderthals.

We have archaic sequences from these enigmatic Denisovans who we now have

a skeleton for since we last talked.

There's now a skull from a Denisovan that's been shown to be a Denisovan.

And we have data from lots of modern humans.

And there's really big mysteries about the relationships amongst these groups.

So, genetically, the Denisovans and the Neanderthals are sisters.

They descend from a common ancestral population five or 600,000 years ago.

And that group descends a couple hundred thousand years before

700,000 or 800,000 years ago from the common ancestors of modern humans.

And so genetically, the whole genome data says that Neanderthals and Denisovans are archaic humans from a common ancestral archaic population.

But there are so many things shared between Neanderthals and modern humans that don't seem to be shared with East Asians.