New variant of the Neanderthal man was discovered in 2008.
By Dileep Thekkethil
The civilized society has always been fascinated in knowing more about the time when man hunted like a beast. Even though anthropologists have found different stages of human evolution, there are fewer details available about the newly found relative of Neanderthal man, the Denisovans.
It was only in 2008 that scientists discovered Denisovans, a new variant of the Neanderthal man, which was till now believed to have existed about 50,000 years ago. But, correcting the speculations regarding the age of the fossils, a DNA test of the tooth fossil collected from a southwestern Siberian cave suggest that the Denisovans had walked the earth many years before what was initially thought.
New data collected from the DNA sample dates the actual existence of Denisovans about 110,000 years ago. The distant relative of the Neanderthals got its name from the Denisova Cave in Russia’s Altai Mountains, where fossils of the new species were discovered.
According to currently available data, the origin of Homo species of prehistoric men dates back to 200,000 and 100,000 years ago in Africa. A breach, popularly known as Homo sapiens, later spread out of Africa 60,000 years ago, replacing Neanderthals and Homo erectus.
Svante Paabo, Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology director and study co-author during an interview with CSMonitor said, “We got the first glimpse of genetic variation in Denisovans and it turns out that they have quite a bit variation, about as much as Neanderthals.”
The results of the study were published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Paabo also added that the tooth fossils collected from the caves belong to two people who lived in different times, one much older than the other.
“We can sort of see that by detecting missing mutations that one of them is much older than the others, and we see that because it hasn’t accumulated so many mutations.” According to him, the recently discovered fossil is close to 60,000 years older than the first Denisovan fossil which was discovered in 2008.
Theoretically, both Neanderthals and Denisovans are two different species but they have a very close resemblance and the difference can be seen only after scrutinizing the original fossils. These two species are considered as the closest relatives of Homo sapiens, the modern humans.
“Neanderthals and Denisovans share a common ancestor with present day people in the order of 600,000 years. But Denisovans are more closely related to Neanderthals than to us,” Paabo explained.
Anthropologist Bence Viola of the University of Toronto said, “These Denisovans who were all found have twice as much genetic diversity as Neanderthals and close to as much genetic diversity as we see in modern humans, which is pretty surprising.”
Viola added: “They clearly were around when the first humans arrived in South East Asia about 50,000 years ago because they interbred with them. But we’re not really sure when extinction occurred.”
According to another study, Denisovans’ genetics has close similarity to a few modern populations such as the Tibetans living in high terrains.
3 Comments
Homo heidelbergensis in Eurasia could have been the ancestor of both Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Were Denisovans a race of humanity like it is claimed here? http://human-races.weebly.com
That site sees to have some bad information, to put it nicely. Ultimately though, any species belonging to the genus Homo is a human much like any genus and species in the family Felidae is a cat.
In common conversational English, people use human interchangeably with Sapiens but it is just as interchangeable with all of the other Homo species.