The Mysterious Denisovans
In anthropology, bones don’t always tell the whole story. Ancient remains can be so rare that an entire species of hominids can be compressed into one single fragment of bone. Thousands of generations, millions of individuals, epic untold stories — and our only insight is a stray tooth, or a few curving shards of skull.
The now-extinct people that we call Denisovans actually consisted of three distinct groups of humans spread throughout Eurasia, the researchers say. And one of those groups might well even be considered its own species. Ancient humans would have interbred with all three of these lineages on multiple occasions, as Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens swapped genetic material in a process that has left Denisovan DNA still residing in our cells today.
Humanity rediscovered the Denisovans only recently. Though some of our long-lost ancestors would have been acquainted with them quite intimately, the humans of today only stumbled across this group of hominins around a decade ago. There, in Denisova Cave, researchers found just a few small fragments of bone that turned out to look unlike anything else they’d seen before. The species were ultimately named for the cave where they were found, and for a time, the Denisovans remained quite mysterious.
But recent work, including the sequencing of their genome, has begun to peel back the layers of mystery. The Denisovans, along with the Neanderthals, were part of a branch of humans that diverged from our own lineage somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 years ago. They inhabited Eurasia for hundreds of thousands of years, reaching from Siberia far into tropical Indonesia, and they interbred with both Neanderthals and modern humans.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d...an-indonesia-humans-new-species/#.XLNJoXdFwcA
