Artificial Intelligence identifies unknown human ancestor - Express Computer

An artificial intelligence system has identified a previously unknown human ancestor that roamed the planet tens of thousands of years ago and left a genomic footprint in Asian individuals, scientists say. By combining deep learning algorithms and statistical methods, researchers from the University of Tartu in Estonia, Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), and the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Spain found that the extinct species was a hybrid of Neanderthals and Denisovans and cross bred with modern humans in Asia. The finding, published in Nature Communications, would explain that the hybrid found last year in the caves of Denisova -- the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father -- was not an isolated case, but rather was part of a more general introgression process. Researchers used deep learning for the first time ever to account for human evolution, paving the way for the application of this technology in other questions in biology, genomics and evolution. One of the ways of distinguishing between two species is that while both of them may cross breed, they do not generally produce fertile descendants.