Scientists have found a toe bone from a Neanderthal woman in a cave located in Siberia. She lived more than 50,000 years ago. That's cool in itself, but her toe holds something much cooler. It holds some modern human DNA, which is strange because she supposedly lived before humans and Neanderthals interbred.

Homo sapiens and Neanderthals are of course already known to have interbred, but according to findings published in Nature, this discovery implies that they interbred many, many years before anyone had ever thought. It was previously believed that Neanderthals genetically contributed to modern humans outside of Africa 47,000 to 65,000 years ago, but this new finding reveals that the species interbred at least 35,000 years before that time.

The Siberian Neanderthal woman held modern human DNA, while those from Spain and Croatia did not. This suggests that a group of humans left Africa and mated with Neanderthals in the Near East when they met. These humans diverged from the population before the major African migration and mated with Neanderthals, and eventually went extinct. Scientist Antonio Rohas stated that

Over 100,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans ventured out of Africa for the first time. These modern humans met and interbred with a group of Neanderthals, which later may have moved to the south of modern day Siberia, carrying the genes of H. sapiens.

This changes that entire pattern of human migration as we know it. This Neanderthal's toe has the possibility to rewrite history.