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...bracelets and other artifacts typical of early human sites dating back about 35,000 years. It was sent to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, for routine genetic analysis. When the results came back, Johannes Krause, a researcher at the institute, called his colleague Svante Pääbo on his cell phone. "You'd better sit down," he said. "The finger is not human." (See TIME's photo-essay "The Secrets of London's Buried Bones...
Krause and Pääbo's analysis, published online on Wednesday by the journal Nature, is the first to identify a novel hominin based on genetic analysis alone - without fossilized remains to offer anatomical reference. But the researchers stop short of declaring the human-like creature a brand-new species. Instead of giving it a Latin name, they refer to the creature publicly as "the Denisova hominin" and in internal e-mails and discussions simply as "X." But privately, scientists at Max Planck - a world leader in the painstaking process of separating genomes from other DNA (of viruses...
...speculate that we may discover that it is an oversimplification to talk about particular exodus events from Africa," says Pääbo. "There might have instead been a continuous gene flow and migration...
...Pääbo says that because the Denisova hominin is assumed to be human, it's possible that there are many other unknown hominin fossils waiting to be discovered. He says paleontologists will continue to scour for remnants in Siberia and other northern regions, where cold weather helps preserve ancient DNA. Most early hominin fossils are from equatorial and tropical regions, where conditions for DNA survival are poor (indeed, although fossil records suggest a distinct hominin species, Homo floresiensis, co-existed with humans in Indonesia, genetic confirmation has proved elusive). (See the top 10 animal stories...
...Staff writer Eric P. Newcomer can be reached at newcomer@fas.harvard.edu...