Cousins Under the Skin

As we continue to learn more about our ancestral past, every addition to the physical evidence the picture changes. The mysteries seem only to keep growing. A case in point is the recent discovery at Denisova Cave in Siberia where a finger bone that is 50,000 years old. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany have extracted the entire genome from the finger bone and found that it belongs to a previously unknown hominid they have called Denisovans. Researchers will need more skeletal samples before they can say what the Denisovans looked like, but they are believed to have emerged from Africa at about the same time as the Neanderthals which was around 500,000 years ago, but settled much farther east. The scientists came to this conclusion by comparing Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes with the genomes of modern humans.