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| Excavation works inside the Denisova cave, where archaeologists found part of a finger bone in 2008 |
By the CNN Wire
December 2010
(CNN) -- An overlooked female pinkie bone put in storage after it
was discovered in a Siberian cave two years ago points to the existence of a
previously unknown prehistoric human species, anthropologists say. And the lineage of that species may
survive today in some people in Papua New Guinea and nearby islands, scientists
say.
A report on the discovery of the
finger was published in the December 23 edition of the scientific journal
Nature. Anthropologists say the 30,000- to
50,000-year-old finger is evidence of a new population of hominids they call
Denisovans. The name is derived from the southern Siberian cave in which the
finger bone was found.
Geneticists say the finger probably
belonged to a 6- or 7-year-old girl.
"The whole story is incredible.
It's like a surprising Christmas present," said Carles Lalueza Fox, a
Spanish paleontologist not involved in the research who was quoted in the
online article.
The 3 billion-letter nuclear genome
derived from the child's finger shows that the ice-age population of early
humans was more diverse than previously thought. Also, a comparison of the
genome to modern humans indicates that Melanesian inhabitants of Papua New
Guinea and various South Pacific islands inherited as much as 5 percent of
their DNA from Denisovans.
The genome research was conducted at
the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
The Denisovans, the scientists say,
were more closely related to Neanderthals than modern humans. The discovery in
Siberia suggests they may have lived across a wide swath of Asia and are likely
to have intermingled with the ancestors of modern humans who migrated eastward
from Africa.
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