A 50 thousand year-old love story between humans and Neanderthals

Human Evolution exhibition at the Natural History Museum on 19th January 2024 in London, United Kingdom. The museum exhibits a vast range of specimens from various segments of natural history. The museum is home to life and earth science specimens comprising some 80 million items within five main collections: botany, entomology, mineralogy, paleontology and zoology. The museum is a centre of research specialising in taxonomy, identification and conservation. (photo by Mike Kemp/In Pictures via Getty Images)

Humans once had a way smaller footprint.

“Homo Sapiens, modern humans, evolved in Africa,” says Arev Sümer, a paleogenetics PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

For millennia, humans stayed in Africa. But then, roughly 100,000 years ago, humans started leaving the continent in waves. “We don’t know exactly when ” says Sümer, but “sometime about 50,000 years or so, there was a group that migrated into Europe and Asia.”