A new study reveals how a group of modern humans arrived in Eurasia much earlier than previously thought who also interbred with Neanderthals. These new findings reveal the first genetic evidence from Homo Sapiens who migrated out of Africa more than 100,000 years ago which is more than 10,000 years earlier than widely thought.

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This evidence comes from this Neanderthal individual, where the remains were uncovered from a cave in the Altai Mountains located in south Siberia, near the borders of Russia and Mongolia.

Genetic analysis revealed remarkable traces of human DNA embedded in the genome of this prehistoric caveman. Scientists consider this as the earliest known evidence for interspecies sex between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

This crucial finding pushes back the timeline of how our human ancestors spread out from the African continent, by around 35,000 years. According to author of the study, Sergi Castellano from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, this is now the first genetic evidence of modern humans living outside of Africa.

This new evidence is also backed up by another pivotal discovery last October when human teeth has been recovered from China dating back to 80,000 to 120,000 years where researchers assume that these two groups were evidence of early migrations from East Africa spreading out to the Arabian Peninsula.

After arriving at the Arabian Peninsula, different groups have dispersed to central Asia and Siberia and the Middle East and eastern Asia. Based on this new study, scientists confirm that the first true modern humans have emerged from Africa some 200,000 years ago.

Researchers also concluded how humans who have interbred with the Altai Neanderthals are not the same ones who populated Europe and Asia some 65,000 years ago. According to co-author of the study, Ilan Gronau from the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center in Israel, these people most likely belonged to a group that was separated from other groups of humans where modern day Africa populations split from each other some 200,000 years ago.

This group of people apparently died out which is also not the ancestors of modern humans outside the African continent, who migrated out of the continent at a much later time.

Researchers also examined the remains of another extinct subhuman species known as the Denisovans who are also found inside the same cave in the Altai mountains. Even if the Denisovans are related from both humans and Neanderthals, scientists believe that they diverged from humans some 600,000 years ago and the Neanderthals some 400,000 years later, surviving until at least 40,000 years ago. 

Apparently, the Neanderthals from Europe and the Denisovans did not possess an modern human DNA. This new study is published in the journal, Nature.