AstralTraveller
25-03-2010, 12:36 PM
It seems we were not alone. According to a paper in Nature today a new species of hominid has been found in a cave in Siberia in a layer dated as 30,000 to 48,000 years ago. This overlaps in time with Homo sapiens (us) Neanderthals and the Hobbit of Flores, meaning there was likely 4 species of hominid in existance at the same time up to relatively recently.
This is the first time a new species of homo has been identified from DNA analysis. In fact all they have is a piece of a little finger. I'm no geneticist but their approach sounds robust. They used two different techniques to derive the DNA sequence and both produced the same result. They believe the lineage of this species seperated from our line about 1 million years ago (Neanderthals split of 500,000 years ago).
It is becoming very obvious that our history is much more complex than had previously been recognised. That shouldn't come as a surprise; in almost any branch of science the more we know the more we realise we don't know much.
This is the first time a new species of homo has been identified from DNA analysis. In fact all they have is a piece of a little finger. I'm no geneticist but their approach sounds robust. They used two different techniques to derive the DNA sequence and both produced the same result. They believe the lineage of this species seperated from our line about 1 million years ago (Neanderthals split of 500,000 years ago).
It is becoming very obvious that our history is much more complex than had previously been recognised. That shouldn't come as a surprise; in almost any branch of science the more we know the more we realise we don't know much.