The evidence for interbreeding between modern humans and archaic variants has involved a bit of asymmetry. Humans met the Neanderthals and Denisovans only after they left Africa, and so the DNA from these archaic humans can be identified by comparing European and Asian populations with those whose ancestors never left Africa. But that leaves the converse question—whether Africans interbred with some of the archaic populations that were presumably present there—difficult to answer. But a study released by PNAS argues that the sort of interbreeding we've seen elsewhere did, in fact, take place in Africa as well.
If anything, we might expect interbreeding to be more likely in Africa; the authors of the new article note that "the fossil record indicates that a variety of transitional forms with a mosaic of archaic and modern features lived over an extensive geographic area from Morocco to South Africa between 200 and 35 kya [thousands of years ago]." However, there's none of the sort of evidence that made the case for interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans an inescapable conclusion: ancient DNA. Many areas of the continent aren't congenial to DNA preservation, meaning that we might never get that sort of evidence.
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