Tuesday 10 April 2012

40,000-year-old finger

The tip of a girl's 40,000-year-old pinky finger found in a cold Siberian cave, paired with faster and cheaper genetic sequencing technology, is helping scientists draw a surprisingly complex new picture of human origins.  The new view is fast is supplanting the traditional idea that modern humans triumphantly marched out of Africa about 50,000 years ago, replacing all other types that had gone before.

Instead, the genetic analysis shows, modern humans encountered and bed with at least two groups of ancient humans in relatively recent times: the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia, dying out roughly 30,000 years ago, and a mysterious group known as the Denisovans, however, lived in Asia and most likely vanished around the same time.  Their DNA lives on in us even though they ae extinct.  In a sense, we are hybrid species.

A third group of extinct humans, Homo floresiensis, nicked named "the Hobbits" because of they ere so small, also walked the earth until about 17,000 years ago.  It is not known whether modern humans bred with them because of the hot, humid climate of the Indonesian island of Flores impairs the preservation of DNA.  This means that our modern era, since H floresiensis died out, is the only time in the four-million year human history that just one type of human has been alive.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE