Traces of interbreeding of Neanderthals and Denisovans with modern humans in the form of archaic DNA have been detected in the genomes of present-day human populations outside sub-Saharan Africa. Up to now, only nuclear archaic DNA has been detected in modern humans; we therefore attempted to identify archaic mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) residing in modern human nuclear genomes as nuclear inserts of mitochondrial DNA (NUMTs)