[ExI] An Indigenous people in the Philippines have the most Denisovan DNA

[John Grigg]

"Denisovans are an elusive bunch, known mainly from ancient DNA samples and
traces of that DNA that the ancient hominids shared when they interbred
with *Homo sapiens*. They left their biggest genetic imprint on people who
now live in Southeast Asian islands, nearby Papua New Guinea and Australia.
Genetic evidence now shows that a Philippine Negrito ethnic group has
inherited the most Denisovan ancestry of all. Indigenous people known as
the Ayta Magbukon get around 5 percent of their DNA from Denisovans, a new
study finds.

This finding fits an evolutionary scenario in which two or more Stone Age
Denisovan populations independently reached various Southeast Asian
islands, including the Philippines and a landmass that consisted of what’s
now Papua New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania. Exact arrival dates are
unknown, but nearly 200,000-year-old stone tools found on the Indonesian
island of Sulawesi
<https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-stone-tools-raise-tantalizing-questions-over-who-colonized-sulawesi>
may
have been made by Denisovans (*SN*: 1/13/16). *H. sapiens* groups that
started arriving around 50,000 years ago or more then interbred with
resident Denisovans.

Evolutionary geneticists Maximilian Larena and Mattias Jakobsson, both at
Uppsala University in Sweden, and their team describe the new evidence
August 12 in *Current Biology*."

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/indigenous-people-philippines-denisovan-dna-genetics
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