From a finger bone, scientists have
reconstructed the genetic world of an entire population of extinct human
relatives called Denisovans. But questions still abound about who
exactly they were.
They weren’t quite like modern humans or Neanderthals, but some other
group entirely. Everything we know about the Denisovans is based on a finger bone and two teeth.
Those small remnants, found in a cave in southern Siberia, are enough
to figure out a few important things about these ancient people -
including that some people today share genes with them.
For the first time, scientists have sequenced the Denisovan genome,
with a quality that is about as high as the genome of a person alive
today. That means scientists can learn about as much genetically about a
person who lived tens of thousands of years ago as they could about a
living person. The findings, published this week in the journal Science,
deliver a wealth of insight about ancient people who roamed the Earth
tens of thousands of years ago.
http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/30/humans-neanderthals-related-to-yet-another-group/?hpt=hp_t3