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Finger bone genome reveals new human ancestor
AFP - Friday, December 24
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Finger bone genome reveals new human ancestor
WASHINGTON (AFP) - – Researchers identified Wednesday a previously unknown relative to the Neanderthal who lived in Asia 30,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of Papua New Guinea inhabitants.
Scientists were able to extract the entire genome of the group known as the Denisovans using only a finger bone and a wisdom tooth found in Siberia's Denisova Cave in 2008.
An earlier mitochondrial genome sequence conducted in March provided little information about the hominid other than it was part of a population long diverged from humans and Neanderthals.
The finger bone and tooth are now known to come from a female from the hominid group that shared its ancient origin with the Neanderthal but quickly diverged.
Unlike the Neanderthals, the Denisovans did not contribute to the genetic pool of modern Eurasians, but share up to one twentieth of their DNA with the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and islands northeast of Australia.
This suggests there was interbreeding between the Denisovans and the ancestors of the Melanesians, the researchers said in a study published in Thursday's edition of the British magazine Nature.
"The story now gets a bit more complicated," said study co-author Richard Green, an assistant professor of biomolecular engineering in the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
"Instead of the clean story we used to have of modern humans migrating out of Africa and replacing Neanderthals, we now see these very intertwined story lines with more players and more interactions than we knew of before."
The international research team was led by Svante Paabo of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Researchers believe the Neanderthals and Denisovans migrated from Africa around half a million years ago.
The Neanderthals moved westward settling in the Middle East and Europe, while the Denisovans traveled to the east and interbred with other humans some 50,000 years ago when they moved to the coasts of southern Asia.
David Reich, a Harvard Medical School geneticist who led the Denisova analysis, said the Denisovans may have migrated from Siberia toward Asia at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch -- 400,000-50,000 years ago.
Paabo, who in an earlier study found modern humans inherited between one and four percent of the Neanderthal's genes, said the genetic combination of Neanderthals with Denisovans show the complex interbreeding that went on among ancient hominid groups.
The squat, low-browed Neanderthals lived in parts of Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East for around 170,000 years but all evidence of them disappears some 28,000 years ago, their last known refuge being Gibraltar.
Why they died out is a matter of furious debate, because they co-existed alongside modern man.
Neanderthals and the extinct relatives of modern humans shared a common ancestor from which they diverged between 300,000 years and 400,000 ago.
"This study fills in some of the details, but we would like to know much more about the Denisovans and their interactions with human populations," Green said.
"And you have to wonder if there were other populations that remain to be discovered. Is there a fourth player in this story?"
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