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DomKen -> RE: They found another one... (11/23/2013 10:47:38 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: jlf1961
quote:
Mystery human species emerges from Denisovan genome
The story of human evolution just got even more bizarre. The genome of an extinct hominin species, the Denisovans, contains unusual snippets of DNA that seem to have come from yet another group.
It could be evidence of an entirely new species of hominin, as yet unknown to science. Alternatively, it could be our first genetic record of one of the many species known only from their fossils.
The new hominin has left its traces in the genome of a Denisovan, an extinct hominin known to exist from a finger bone and two teeth found in a Siberian cave. Nobody knows what Denisovans looked like because there are so few fossils. But geneticists have managed to sequence their entire genome to a high degree of accuracy.
First there were two, Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, then the Denisovans came along to complicate things, and now there may be a fourth?
I want to know who in the hell was playing with the beginners guide to genetics lab after the dinos got zapped.
Does this mean we are closer to finding the missing link?
There were always more than two. H erectus was a very successful species and as it's various populations migrated across Africa and Eurasia it was inevitable that some would get isolated and new species would emerge. H denisova is a split from the H neandertalis line but it looks like it interbred with some other population of proto humans, likely H erectus or H heidelbergenesis.
This would indicate that while our perception of the morphology of hominids changes greatly over time, we are built to see ourselves in great detail, in reality very little has changed genetically over the last million years or so.
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