Neandertal/Modern Human Hybridization in North Africa?

That is the focus of a new paper in PLoS ONE by Sanchez and colleagues.  Using 780 thousand single nucleotide polymorphisms of 125 individuals from populations in North Africa, they write:

We found that North African populations have a significant excess of derived alleles shared with Neandertals, when compared to sub-Saharan Africans. This excess is similar to that found in non-African humans, a fact that can be interpreted as a sign of Neandertal admixture. Furthermore, the Neandertal's genetic signal is higher in populations with a local, pre-Neolithic North African ancestry. Therefore, the detected ancient admixture is not due to recent Near Eastern or European migrations. Sub-Saharan populations are the only ones not affected by the admixture event with Neandertals.

Well, raise my rent! When we analyzed the modern human remains in the Near East using canonical variates analysis, we found that they showed more of a similarity with North African archaics than they did Neandertals and that this supported a model of a general northern migration of North Africans into the Levant between 100 and 200 thousand years ago. I will be interested to see the reaction to this from the morphologists.

Ironically, the bulk of the evidence supporting the admixture of modern humans and Neandertals has always been based on the fossil record, while the genetic evidence has traditionally been used to argue for a recent African origin. It is interesting to see all of the genetic studies that have turned the tables. There is not a specific level of admixture at which point you can say "hey, these are the same species," but the studies continue to come out suggesting that admixture was taking place wherever these two groups intermingled and that there do not seem to have been biological imperatives to mate.  They simply decided to do so.  Remember the sage words of J. Lawrence Angel: "When two groups of people meet, they may fight but they willl always mate."