Coming on the heels of the recent discovery that Neanderthals contributed to the genetic makeup of modern non-African humans, scientists at Harvard Medical School have discovered that modern-day Melanesians are partly descended from another archaic and now extinct hominid species, Denisova hominin, also called Denisovans.
Denisovans and Neanderthals were ancestral cousins, leaving Africa half a million years ago only for Neanderthals to settle in the Near East and Europe, and for the Denisovans to head further East, into Siberia (where a finger bone from a young Denisovan girl was found, providing the DNA) and South Asia, where they interbred with humans when they arrived there about 50,000 years ago. So far matches have been found with modern-day New Guineans and other nearby Melanesian peoples, showing that Denisovan genes have survived in those populations, and will probably be found spread further afield once more research has been done. The Denisovans had not vanished without a trace.
And so the journey into our remote past, and the research into human heritage, becomes a little more complex and yet even more astounding.
NYTimes: Denisovans were Neanderthal’s Cousins, DNA Analysis Reveals
TGDaily: Third type of ancient humans interbred with our ancestors
