Rogers, J. et al. Sci. Adv. 5, eaau6947 (2019)

Researchers working with baboons have new genomic resources available to them with the recent publication of a reference genome assembly for the olive baboon, Papio anubis, along with whole-genome sequence data for the remaining Papio species.

Making up an order of Old World Monkeys that live throughout Africa, baboons began diverging from one another about 1.5 million years ago. The six extant lineages are morphologically and behaviorally distinct, but they retain the ability to hybridize with one another; the research team that assembled the genomes found genetic signatures of interbreeding throughout the baboons’ evolutionary history. The results suggest that baboons could be interesting models for understanding the functional consequences of interspecies hybridization in primates, including that between Homo sapiens and other now-extinct hominins.