Our line and the Neanderthal line separate
The population ancestral to modern humans splits from the one ancestral to Neanderthals and Denisovans.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 150 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 100 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
Genomic estimates place the divergence between the modern human lineage and the Neanderthal-Denisovan lineage somewhere between roughly 750,000 and 550,000 years ago, though dental morphology has been used to argue for a considerably earlier date. After the split the two lineages evolve on different continents — ours in Africa, theirs in Eurasia — for hundreds of thousands of years, before meeting again and interbreeding.