KZBlog

A finger bone was found in the Denisova cave in Sibera in the Altai mountain range which covers China, Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia. Anthropologists believe this finger bone may belong to a new humanoid species that would have lived around 30,000 years ago and lived at the same time as Neanderthals and modern humans:

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, ran genetic tests on the bone fragments and were stunned to find it did not match the DNA profile of Neanderthals or early modern humans.Johannes Krause sequenced DNA from mitochondria, the sub-cellular bodies that carry genetic material passed down only the maternal line. Because the DNA came from the mother, they called the creature “X-woman”.

“It really looked like something I had never seen before. It was a sequence which is similar in some ways to humans, but still quite distinct,” Krause said. It is the first time a new type of human has been identified from DNA alone.

By comparing the DNA with sequences from Neanderthals and modern humans, Krause’s team concluded that modern humans shared a common ancestor with the creature a million years ago. Humans and Neanderthals diverged from an ancestor that lived 500,000 years ago.