Did Archaic Ghost Hominins Admix With Humans In Africa?

This article supports the highly plausible theory that all humans share pre-Out of Africa admixture with "ghost" archaic hominin populations, but the methodology used is fairly new and untested.

Admixture between modern humans and extinct hominins has shaped the genomes of present-day individuals, but reconstructing this history has been constrained by the scarcity of archaic samples and unadmixed outgroup populations. 

We introduce TRACE, a reference- and outgroup-free approach that uses features of ancestral recombination graphs to identify archaic ancestry. Simulations show TRACE has high precision and low false discovery rates. 

Applied to 1000 Genomes, TRACE recovers known Neanderthal and Denisovan introgression and uncovers ghost admixture from uncharacterized hominins in both Africans and non-Africans. Ghost ancestry persists in Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry deserts, challenging their interpretation as Homo sapiens–specific regions. In Oceanians, TRACE finds deep lineages are enriched in Denisovan compared to Neanderthal regions, supporting super-archaic introgression. TRACE enables mapping archaic introgression without archaic genomes.

Yulin Zhang, Arjun Biddanda, Sarah A. Johnson, Colm O’Dushlaine, and Priya Moorjani, "Recovering signatures of archaic hominin introgression using ancestral recombination graphs" Science (July 30, 2026) (open access) DOI: 10.1126/science.aef887

Replicating MOND In A Spin-Foam Model

Spin-foam is a quantum gravity approach that quantizes space-time, rather than treating gravity as a separate force with a carrier boson comparable to a photon or a gluon.

We argue that effects of the quantum spin-connection foam, which describes quantum gravity according to the precanonical quantization of General Relativity, may already be observed in the form of the small cosmological constant and a modification of Newtonian dynamics at small accelerations, manifested in the flat rotation curves of galaxies. 

We obtain a modification of the Newtonian potential that takes into account the existence of a fundamental small acceleration scale, a∗ = 8πGℏϰ, where ϰ is a parameter with the dimensions of inverse spatial volume that appears on dimensional grounds. The connection between ϰ and the hadronic scale of the mass gap in the pure Yang-Mills sector of the Standard Model leads to an estimated value of a∗ compatible with the Milgromian acceleration scale in MOND. The connection between a*^2 and the cosmological constant leads to a realistic value of the latter. Milgromian MOND, together with a theoretically distinct interpolating function, is derived under the assumption that classical dynamics is modified by the mean-field acceleration calculated from the simplest solution of precanonical quantum gravity in the nonrelativistic approximation. 

We also indicate that the effects of Newtonian dynamics modified by the spin-connection foam may be observable in the Solar System and even in laboratory experiments.

Igor V. Kanatchikov, Valery A. Kholodnyi, "Effects of Quantum Spin-Connection Foam in the Solar System, Galaxies, and the Universe" arXiv:2608.12404 (August 11, 2026) (The Seventeenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting on Recent Developments in Theoretical and Experimental General Relativity, Astrophysics, and Relativistic Field Theories, Pescara 7-12 July 2024, edited by G. Vereshchagin and R. Ruffini, this https URL, October 2026).