In the News
recovered dna
suggests a new
type of hominid
stone Age relative may have
lived among modern humans
story one
by bruce bower
Anew member of the human evolutionary family has been proposed for the first time based on an ancient genetic
sequence, not fossil bones. Even more
surprising, this mysterious hominid, if
confirmed, would have lived near Stone
Age Neandertals and Homo sapiens.
“It was a shock to find DNA from a
new type of ancestor that has not been
on our radar screens,” says geneticist
Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in
Leipzig, Germany.
REDMAL/istockphoto, ADAptED by A. nAnDy
Researchers led by Pääbo and Max
Planck graduate student Johannes
Krause propose the new hominid based
on DNA from a finger bone, found in
the Altai Mountains of central Asia,
that dates to between about 48,000 and
30,000 years ago. The DNA suggests
the hominid left Africa in a previously
unsuspected migration around 1 million years ago, the team reports online
March 24 in Nature.
Paleoanthropologists have generally
assumed that hominids left Africa in a
few discrete waves, starting with Homo
erectus about 1. 9 million years ago. (In
the April 9 Science, researchers introduce
a new hominid species, Australopithecus
Heidelberg, Germany
Homo heidelbergensis
500,000 years ago
Dmanisi, Georgia
Homo erectus
1,800,000 years ago
Denisova Cave, Siberia
“X woman”
Roughly 40,000 years ago
neandertals, Homo sapiens
beginning 125,000 years ago
Zhoukoudian Cave, China
Homo erectus
At least 500,000 years ago
Java, Indonesia
Homo erectus
Roughly 700,000 years ago
Flores, Indonesia
Homo floresiensis
90,000 to 13,000 years ago
another hominid, dubbed “X woman,” may need to be added to the list of species
(see map) outside of africa for which there is fossil or genetic evidence.
sediba, that they argue was ancestral to
Homo erectus. But other scientists are
highly skeptical of the new species’ relationship to the Homo genus.)
General consensus holds that Neandertal ancestors, known as H. heidelbergensis, left Africa between 500,000 and
300,000 years ago, followed by humans
around 50,000 years ago. But the new
genetic sequence supports a scenario in
which at least one additional and possibly many more African hominid lineages
trekked to Asia and Europe in the wake
of H. erectus, Pääbo says.
The finger bone that provided the
curious sequence was unearthed in 2008
at Denisova Cave in southern Siberia’s
Altai Mountains. Previous excavations
of stone and bone artifacts in the cave
have indicated that Neandertals and
modern humans lived there periodically
beginning at least 125,000 years ago, but
few fossils have turned up at the site.
