I was reading about this yesterday and instantly was thinking about the theories that someone or something intervened in our development as a human race. Great Short Video of the discussion from PBS Nova Full Interview: https://www.pbs.org/video/interview-hobbits-neanderthals-and-dragon-man-with-ella-al-shamahi-dtvnk8/ TLDR: Studies from University of Berkeley and Cambridge have two different methods of detecting ghost DNA in our genome. Both studies hav...

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A new paper in the journal Science (July 2026) used a clever computer method to look at the DNA of people alive today. It found small leftover pieces of DNA from very old human-like groups we never found fossils for. These “ghost” bits are in pretty much everybody, and they don’t match the Neanderthals or Denisovans we already know about. Link to the real paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aef8874 Here’s the fun “what if”: maybe those mystery groups weren’t just more Earth hum...

"...this finding challenges the old stereotype of Neanderthals as cognitively inferior to us, showing that they were not failed humans but successful, innovative people in their own right." Neanderthal ‘dentists’ treated cavities 59,000 years ago ~~~ "...new research published...indicates that [Neanderthals] were capable of complex dental interventions, which adds a series of cognitive and physical updates to the Neanderthal story. "...the procedure was performed on a living person, and...the...