Our partial ancestors differed a little in appearance from modern humans.
Neanderthals and Denisovans are some of the nearest ancestors to modern humans. These hominins were so similar to us that they even interbred with humans for thousands of years when the three overlapped in time and space in certain areas. Many people today still carry important genetic material from these cousins of ours — meaning that, in a sense, they never completely went extinct..
"We know quite a bit about the DNA that they’ve contributed to modern humans. Some of it has been very useful,” says Alan Rogers, an anthropologist at the University of Utah. Rogers his colleagues believe that Neanderthals and Denisovans came from a common ancestor they call Neandersovans that spread out from Africa about 750,000 years ago. The Neandersovans spread across Eurasia, at which point the story gets even more complicated. Neandersovans interbred with a super archaic population of hominins that had spread out from Africa about 2 million years ago.
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