When it comes to interracial sex we usually think of a black-on-white arrangement, that due to prejudices and stereotypes comes off as somehow more morbidly exciting than other ethnic combinations. Last week a joint team of scientists from Harvard Medical School in Boston and the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig announced the discovery of something much more exotic: what about sex between different human species?
This unexpected development came out of a new sequencing of the genomes of 30 to 50,000 years old human bones from the Denisova cave in Siberia, Russia. The forensic procedure confirmed that the local ancestral species, called ‘Denisovan’, had traces of Neanderthal and current human genes in its DNA. This was expected, as previous studies had already shown that the first Homo Sapiens Sapiens (that’s us) interbred with the last of the less evolved human species. What paleontologists didn’t see coming were however further traces of another DNA strand from an altogether different archaic population of Asian origin, nor human nor Neanderthal.
The experts who met at the Royal Society in London to hear about the discovery are as excited as they are puzzled. There is no agreement yet even about the exact identity of the latter species: the best bet is on some variation of Homo Heidelbergensis, the African proto-humans that gave origin to the Neanderthals when they moved to Europe, and who might have spawned into Asia reaching Siberia too.
Anyway, what is now sure is that about forty thousand years ago Earth was populated by a variety of hominid species that reminds – in the words of Nature magazine – of aLord of the rings-type world: same overall shape, but different sizes, skills and languages. These species clearly met from time to time… and when they did, they also had the ultimate interracial sex – an act that possibly gave life to human life as we know it. Knowing how these things go, now I wouldn’t be surprised if, as soon as someone invents a time machine, one of the first application will be to make a video of it.
