Tomislav Maricic

TL;DR: The genomic data suggest that Neandertals mixed with modern human ancestors some 120,000 years ago, leaving traces of Ne andertal DNA in contemporary humans, suggesting that gene flow from Neand Bertals into the ancestors of non-Africans occurred before the divergence of Eurasian groups from each other.

TL;DR: A tooth found in Denisova Cave carries a mitochondrial genome highly similar to that of the finger bone, further indicating that Denisovans have an evolutionary history distinct from Neanderthals and modern humans.

TL;DR: Analysis of the assembled sequence unequivocally establishes that the Neandertal mtDNA falls outside the variation of extant human mtDNAs, and allows an estimate of the divergence date between the two mtDNA lineages of 660,000 +/- 140,000 years.

TL;DR: This work describes a novel and economical method in which custom made long-range PCR products are used to capture complete human mitochondrial genomes from complex DNA mixtures, and it is suitable for targets that can be amplified by PCR and do not contain highly repetitive sequences such as mtDNA.

TL;DR: Targeted sequencing improves Neandertal mitochondrial DNA retrieval and reveals low diversity among individuals, and together with analyses of mtDNA protein evolution, these data suggest that the long-term effective population size of Ne andertals was smaller than that of modern humans and extant great apes.