What blood were our ancestors made of?
Map showing the distribution of the individuals studied, their age, their blood type © Stéphane Mazières
By: Caroline Lachowsky
2 min
What blood were our ancestors made of?
How does deciphering Neanderthal and Denisova blood groups bring us even closer to these other forms of humanity that have now disappeared?
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What blood were our ancestors made of? A question which may seem strange but which sheds new light on the entire evolutionary history of our humanity, in connection with other human lineages which have now disappeared. By succeeding in deciphering the blood groups of Neanderthals and Denisovans, a transdisciplinary team from the University of Aix-Marseille demonstrated that these other branches - now extinct - of Humanity, were endowed with the same blood system. ABO that we Homo-Sapiens.
A surprise that allows both to confirm our common origin in Africa but also to better understand the health, demography, successive interbreeding and even the possible causes of disappearances of these other human species which populated the earth between 100,000 and 40 000 years before a single species, ours, replaced them.
With
Silvana Condémi
paleoanthropologist director of research at the CNRS and
Stéphane Mazières
whose research work focuses on the study of the human genetic diversity of blood groups.
They will tell us about the Neanderthal and Denisova blood groups that they managed to decipher
The CNRS press release here
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