NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists have identified a new pod of ancient hunter-gatherers who lived near the land bridge between North America and South America about 6,000 years ago.

Researchers are still charting how human populations spread across the Americas thousands of years ago, arriving first in North America before veering south. Groups that split off developed their own collection of genes that scientists can use to piece together the human family tree.

Discovered through ancient DNA, the group lived in the high plateaus of present-day Bogotá, Colombia — close to where the Americas meet. Scientists aren’t sure exactly where they fall in the family tree because they’re not closely related to ancient Native Americans in North America and also not linked to ancient or present-day South Americans.

The new study was published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

“Up to this point, we didn’t believe there was any other lineage that would appear in South America,” said archaeologist Andre Luiz Campelo dos Santos with Florida Atlantic University who was not involved with the new research. “This is unexpected.”

Just 4,000 years later, these ancient humans were gone and a genetically-different human clan inhabited the area. Scientists aren’t sure exactly what happened to make them fade away — whether they mixed into a new, bigger group or were pushed out entirely.

Analyzing more genes in South America will help confirm if this new group truly did disappear or if there could be evidence of their descendants elsewhere, said Campelo dos Santos.

Studying these ancient Colombian genes are important to piecing together the history of the Americas since ancient people had to cross this land bridge to settle in and spread across South America.

The area is “the gateway to the South American continent,” said study author Andrea Casas-Vargas with the National University of Colombia.

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) — A large elephant seal took a wrong turn and was seen lumbering along a street in a coastal town in South Africa early Tuesday, surprising residents and inspiring a rescue effort to get him back to sea.

The two-ton seal, which an animal welfare group said was a young male, was making his way through a suburb of Gordon’s Bay near Cape Town.

Locals came out of houses and recorded videos.

“This is unreal. Hi, bro, how did you get here?” one woman asked.

Police and a local security company attempted to contain the seal by parking patrol cars around him. He rested his huge head on the hood of one car and half-climbed over another before slipping free, crossing a road and carrying on up a sidewalk.

The seal eventually stopped next to a shopping mall. Animal welfare officials worried he was too far from the ocean to find his way back and might become exhausted and dehydrated. They estimated he weighed around two tons (4,400 pounds). Elephant seals can grow to twice that size.

A team of marine wildlife specialists and a city veterinarian sedated the seal and guided him into an animal transport trailer to be returned to his natural habitat at a nearby bay.

The local Cape of Good Hope SPCA later posted a video on social media of the seal making his way down a beach and toward the ocean.

“Sea you later,” the video said.

PARIS (AP) — They were just playfighting.

That was French President Emmanuel Macron ‘s explanation Monday for video images that showed his wife, Brigitte, pushing her husband away with both hands on his face before they disembarked from their plane to start a tour of Southeast Asia this weekend.

The moment quickly made headlines in France, with media trying to decipher the interaction that cameras spotted through the just-opened door of the plane. The headline of a story on the website of the daily Le Parisien newspaper asked: “Slap or ‘squabble’? The images of Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron disembarking in Vietnam trigger a lot of comment.”

Macron later told reporters that the couple — married since 2007 after meeting at the high school where he was a student and she was a teacher — were simply joking around.

“We are squabbling and, rather, joking with my wife,” he said, adding that the incident was being overblown into “a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”

In video taken by The Associated Press as the Macrons arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Sunday, a uniformed man can be seen pulling open the plane door and revealing the president standing inside, dressed in a suit and talking to someone who wasn’t visible.

Brigitte Macron’s arms — in red — were seen reaching out and pushing Macron away, with one hand covering his mouth and part of his nose while the other was on his jaw. The French leader recoiled, turning his head away. Then, apparently realizing that he was on camera, he broke into a smile and gave a little wave.

In subsequent images, Macron and his wife, wearing a red jacket, appeared at the top of the stairs. He offered an arm but she didn’t take it. They walked down the carpeted stairs side by side.

The French leader argued that the images and reaction to them offered a cautionary tale about disinformation in the social media age, noting that in recent weeks, other videos had been used to circulate made-up stories about him.

“Everyone needs to calm down,” he said.

His office also downplayed the interaction.

“It was a moment where the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around. It’s a moment of complicity. It was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists,” his office said.

Brigitte Macron was Brigitte Auzière, a married mother of three children, when they met at his high school. A teacher, she supervised the drama club where Emmanuel Macron, a literature lover, was a member.

He moved to Paris for his last year of high school, but promised to marry Brigitte. She later moved to the French capital to join him and divorced before they finally married.