Not just Neanderthals: Ghost lineage in Africa left its mark on our DNA
introgressive Not just Neanderthals: Ghost lineage in Africa left its mark on our DNAvar abtest_2165792 = new ABTest(2165792, 'click'); Some group with no modern descendants contributed a lot to our genomes. And it will be tempting to write it as a very tidy story: Once we got genomes from these other groups, it was possible to identify the sequences in our genomes that we shared with them. But in reality, as scientists started poking large enough collections of data, there were regular hints of some strange ancestry in our genomes.
- ▪introgressive Not just Neanderthals: Ghost lineage in Africa left its mark on our DNAvar abtest_2165792 = new ABTest(2165792, 'click'); Some group with no modern descendants contributed a lot to our genomes.
- ▪And it will be tempting to write it as a very tidy story: Once we got genomes from these other groups, it was possible to identify the sequences in our genomes that we shared with them.
- ▪But in reality, as scientists started poking large enough collections of data, there were regular hints of some strange ancestry in our genomes.
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| Original publisher | Ars Technica |
| Canonical URL | https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/not-just-neanderthals-ghost-lineage-in-africa-left-its-mark-on-our-dna/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 31 Jul 2026 22:17:05 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-31T22:23:29.264Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-31T22:23:29.264Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | ri5yfT2zS2qI · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
introgressive Not just Neanderthals: Ghost lineage in Africa left its mark on our DNAvar abtest_2165792 = new ABTest(2165792, 'click'); Some group with no modern descendants contributed a lot to our genomes. John Timmer – Jul 31, 2026 6:17 pm | 0 Credit: BSIP Credit: BSIP Text settings Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more Minimize to nav When the history of our ancestry is written, the fact that we’ve interbred with some of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, will have a central role. And it will be tempting to write it as a very tidy story: Once we got genomes from these other groups, it was possible to identify the sequences in our genomes that we shared with them.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ars Technica.
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