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With the help of artificial intelligence, a team of Spanish researchers has identified in the genome of the Asian people the imprint of an unknown species of hominids, resulting from the crossing of Neanderthals with the inhabitants and which joined thousands of years ago with modern man, reports EFE cited by Agerpres.
It was already known that the inhabitants of Neanderthals and Neanderthals, the most extinct ancestors of today's population, crossed prehistory at some point, as evidenced by the bone discovered last summer in Denisova (Siberia).
The research now confirms that this cross was generalized and that it produced a hybrid species that was combined with the modern man.
The study, published in Nature Communications, used the so-called success for the first time "Deep learning" (machine learning algorithms) to explain the history of humanity, which opens the way for a wider use of this technology to answer other questions in the field of the genome or of evolutionary biology.
Researchers have identified in the genome of Asian individuals the imprint of this new species of hominids by combining algorithms "Deep learning" with statistical methods. The computerized analysis of current human DNA shows that this missing species was a hybrid of non-Santander and inhabitants, combined in Asia with modern humans who left Africa.
The study included researchers from the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE-UPF), the National Center for Genomic Analysis (CNAG-CRG), the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and the University of Tartu of Estonia.
According to Jaume Bertranpetit, researcher at the IBE-UPF in Barcelona, "80,000 years ago, the so-called" Out of Africa "occurred when part of the human population, already composed of modern humans, has left this continent and has spread to other continents, giving rise to current populations".
"Since then, we know that there have been crossings between modern and non-American people on all continents, except in Africa – and inhabitants in Oceania, and certainly in Southeast Asia, but evidence of a cross with a third extinct species was been confirmed ", said the Catalan expert.
So far, the existence of the third species was only a theory to explain the origin of the fragments of the current human genome, but – according to Bertranpetit – the use of the algorithm "Deep learning" it was the one that allowed to pass from the DNA to the demographics of the ancestral populations.
In turn, Oscar Lao, a researcher at CRG, said that "Deep learning" is an algorithm that mimics the functioning of the mammalian nervous system with different artificial neurons that specialize and learn to detect data from those models that are important to achieve a specific ".
"We used this property to determine the algorithm to learn how to predict human demographics using genomes obtained through hundreds of thousands of simulations and to decipher a possible trajectory of human history"Lao explained.
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Siberia
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Neanderthal
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hominids
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Denisova
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denisovanii
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