Your link downloaded a trojan onto my system, dude!.
Oops, I knew that…
[QUOTE=Spectre of Pithecanthropus]
Oops, I knew that…[/QUOTE
Anyone who still uses “Pithecanthropus” can be excused, I suppose. 
I suppose this thread is answering the OP, but what about common DNA? Do we have any ancient DNA or any indications of what it may have been? Does DNA fossilize? Are there any indirect indicators of the nature of ancient DNA?
We have tons of ancient DNA. We share something like 90% of our DNA with mice. That’s gotta be pretty dang old-- over 60M years old. We share some DNA with yeast, so think how “old” that must be!
The chimpanzee genome has recently been published, and theoretically that will tell us exactly what it is that makes us us and chimps chimps. But first we have to figure out exactly what all those genes do…
A little, but not terribly much, and not terribly ancient. DNA isn’t a very stable molecule at the best of times, and it usually decays rapidly after death. But we do have a few points.
For example DNA has been extracted form a few Neanderthals from around 40, 00 years ago. Specifically it was mitochondrial DNA, which tend sot be a bit more stable and a bit easier to analyse. The surprise result was that it fell well outside the range of variation for modern humans. So the conclusion was that Neanderthals and humans never interbred much despite overlapping range for tens of thousands of years. It seemed like a clincher for Neanderthals being a separate species, and a boost for the Out of Africa theory.
Then someone analysed specimens of thoroughly modern humans from Australia from about the same time. And their DNA was even less like that of modern humans than Neanderthals. Yet we knew that these were the same species as us. So we went right back to square one concerning Neanderthal interbreeding and whether they were a separate species. It appears that humans went through yet another genetic bottleneck within the last 50, 000 years that eliminated at least one highly divergent maternal line completely from the planet. And if that bottleneck eliminated the Australian line it could also have eliminated the Neanderthal line and who knows how many others.
So really this just deepens the confusion. Because we know that entire divergent lineages have been extinguished in the recent past we really can’t comment at all on what the early humans were like genetically. All modern humans are essentially identical genetically to Africans, and all major modern genes are represented by someone in Africa. But ancient humans varied considerably between continents and Australian genes were not founding African humans, nor were Neanderthal genes… That is often seen as a boost for the multiregional and partial replacement theorists. Humans can’t have left Africa in a hurry and rapidly colonised Australia. They had to have had time to develop these highly variant genetic traits. That suggests that they either evolved in separate pockets outside Africa, or else the Africans interbred with the locals in SE Asia before arriving in Australia and obtained their novel maternal line that way.
But once again for every theory there is a counter theory, and studies of ancient DNA just add more questions and answer nothing.
No. Fossilisation os a process where organic material is replaced by atoms and molecules in the surrounding mud. DNA I itself a molecule. Since it can’t be both replaced and still continue to exist it obviously can’t fossilise.
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Are there any indirect indicators of the nature of ancient DNA?
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Not really. When it looked clear that modern humans were all of recent common decent we thought we could get a handle on when the last common female or male ancestors lived, and some idea of their genetics, by working backwards form a large enough sample of current people. But now that it appears that all current humans are just one small branch that managed to survive and that modern humans were once far more diverse we have nothing to work with at all.
And what about the remains of those miniature humans found in Indonesia (I think) recently? Do we have common DNA? Are they related to Australians? Homo sapiens? How do they fit in?
No one has attempted to extract genetic material from the Hobbit specimens AFAIK. They are unlikely to have any salvagable material anyway since heat and humidity tend to destroy DNA fast, and those things were found in a cave, on a mountain, under mud, in a rainforest, in the tropics. So they aren’t good candiates. However they are still half the age of the earliest specimens, so hope remains.
The results could prove very interesting if material can be extracted. Humans were well established on Australia and surrounding islands by the time they died, so they probably also coexisted on Flores itself. The most interetsing result would be if they have genetic similarities to the extinct Australian lineage. That would pretty much clinch the partial replacement hypothesis.
Are they related to Australians? No, or at least no more related than they are to anyone else. Modern Australians aren’t genetically distinct from modern Europeans. Any genetically distinct Australian lineage has gone the way of the Dodo sometime in the last 50,000 years.
Are they related to H.sapiens? For sure. The question is how closely related and in what way.
I’d like to read more about this. Do you have a cite?
Morphological* analysis indicates that they are a side branch of Home erectus. Cousins once removed, if you will. The scientists working with the fossils hope to be able to do some DNA analysis, but none has been done yet. As** Blake **mentioned, though, the environment that the fossils were found in is not too amenable to preserving DNA.
*the physical structure of the bones
I have no doubt it was plausible, but what my “fantasy” entails is getting the actual true data. I really want to see what actually was each organism between me and the original cell. I can make a merely plausible chain of pictures myself, probably.