Archaeologica.org

30,000-year-old girl's pinkie points to new early human species

An overlooked female pinkie bone put in storage after it was discovered in a Siberian cave two years ago points to the existence of a previously unknown prehistoric human species, anthropologists say.
And the lineage of that species may survive today in some people in Papua New Guinea and nearby islands, scientists say.

A report on the discovery of the finger was published in the December 23 edition of the scientific journal Nature.
Anthropologists say the 30,000- to 50,000-year-old finger is evidence of a new population of hominids they call Denisovans. The name is derived from the southern Siberian cave in which the finger bone was found.
Geneticists say the finger probably belonged to a 6- or 7-year-old girl.

"The whole story is incredible. It's like a surprising Christmas present," said Carles Lalueza Fox, a Spanish paleontologist not involved in the research who was quoted in the online article.
The 3 billion-letter nuclear genome derived from the child's finger shows that the ice-age population of early humans was more diverse than previously thought. Also, a comparison of the genome to modern humans indicates that Melanesian inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and various South Pacific islands inherited as much as 5 percent of their DNA from Denisovans.

The genome research was conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

The Denisovans, the scientists say, were more closely related to Neanderthals than modern humans. The discovery in Siberia suggests they may have lived across a wide swath of Asia and are likely to have intermingled with the ancestors of modern humans who migrated eastward from Africa.

Wanna bet they walked/

I think now to the fact that both the Romans and Muslims abhorred the idea of the king. The Romans overthrew their monarchy, established a republic, and replaced it with a despotism which was a monarchy in all but name. The Muslims had caliphs, vice-reagents of God, and sultans and emirs, who were vice-reagents of the caliphs. Despite the glory which is given over to their God the Muslim despotisms were things of men. Domination of the many by one is a matter of substance, not style. Human dignity should not be contingent on details of ancestry. Isn’t that obvious? I thought that was what the 20th century was to some extent all about.

kbs2244 wrote:The only problem is most of those rivers flow north.
They would have been a pretty good food source though.

Domination of the many by one is a matter of substance, not style

Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.

--Gaius Sallustius Crispus

Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master.

Minimalist wrote:Siberia does have rivers, though.



I would not bet that these people were too stupid to learn how to make use of them.

Minimalist wrote:That's a great link, Circ. Going to take a while to get through it.

the biggest problem was the interpretation of
the facts by journalists and the media spin doctors

RS wrote:Siberia is obviously not like the Arizona desert. It is extremely cold. Like minus 50ºC in the daytime, and minus 70ºC at night. And back then it was glacial max!