Neanderthal Origins: Three Ancestor Candidates, No Answers
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- Neanderthals lived in Europe and Asia for several hundred thousand years before disappearing around 40,000 years ago, with the oldest known fossils from Sima de los Huesos in northern Spain (~430,000 years old) showing Neanderthal-like DNA when sequenced in 2016.
- Three hominin species — Homo erectus, Homo antecessor, and Homo heidelbergensis — are the leading candidates for Neanderthal ancestry, but none can be confirmed due to a lack of preserved DNA from fossils that are either too old or found in climates that degraded genetic material.
- Homo antecessor, known only from Spain's Gran Dolina cave and dated to 772,000–949,000 years ago, became a more plausible candidate after 2020 protein extraction from a tooth linked it to the mysterious shared 'Ancestor X.'
- Homo heidelbergensis, once the leading candidate for Ancestor X, has lost ground because most of its fossils were reassigned to other species and remaining specimens appear too recent (300,000–500,000 years old).
- Genetic evidence points to the ancestors of modern humans splitting from the Neandersovans 500,000–700,000 years ago, placing the source population somewhere in western Asia near the eastern Mediterranean, Levant, Caucasus, or Ukraine.
- A Yunxian skull from China (940,000–1.1 million years old) appears to be an early Denisovan, pushing back the timeline for Ancestor X and putting H. erectus back into the frame.
- A tentative hypothesis suggests Neanderthals emerged from ancient interbreeding hundreds of thousands of years ago, which — if confirmed — would require the biggest rewrite of the human family tree to date.
Why it matters: Without preserved DNA from any of the three candidate species, researchers can't confirm the evolutionary chain linking early hominins to Neanderthals — leaving roughly 500,000 years of ancestry unresolved. Confirming the tentative ancient-interbreeding hypothesis would force a wholesale rewrite of how modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans relate on the family tree.
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