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    Humans Are One Mixed-Up Ape

    by Phil Jaekl Jul 09, 2021 7 minutes

    If you look at every ape protein, they have every bone we have, every muscle we have, the same type of hair, and on and on. They’re just better adapted to their tropical rainforest environment.Illustration by BRO.vector / Shutterstock

    Recent fossilized bone discoveries in China and Israel support the exciting possibility of new, previously unknown species of archaic humans that wandered the planet alongside Homo sapiens. These discoveries pose new questions regarding the nature of our interaction with other archaic human species.

    Todd Disotell, a biological anthropologist and molecular primatologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has headed research on primate genome sequencing, which at first concluded Homo sapiens didn’t interbreed with other species of early humans. But his and other scientists’ subsequent research has now reversed this conclusion, revealing that in fact hominins, or early humans, such as Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans (first identified in Siberia in 2010), did interbreed. The evolution of humans is now best pictured not as a simple tree with branches but, Disotell says, borrowing the priceless term from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “shrubbery.

    I like to joke that the Middle Pleistocene was a

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