By comparing DNA sequences, Nobel laureate Svante Paabo and his team found ‘gene flow’ between both Denisovans and Neanderthals, and between Denisovans and modern humans.
Little is known about the mysterious Denisovans. These distant Neanderthals roamed eastern and southern Eurasia, but left little trace of their time on Earth.
“Hominin Denisova” was discovered by Swedish paleontologist Svante Paabo, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine.
In 2012, Paabo and his team sequenced the DNA of a well-preserved bone fragment that was 40,000 years old and found four years earlier in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia.
The results were astounding: They encountered a completely novel hominin, distinct from Neanderthals and even more so than modern humans.
The Denisovans shared a common ancestor with the Neanderthals until their population dispersed between 380,000 and 470,000 years ago.
This is much later than the split between modern humans and Neanderthals/Denisovans, which occurred between 550,000 and 760,000 years ago.
In the same cave, paleontologists later discovered the fossils of a Neanderthal and Denisovan girl, proving that the two species were hybrids.
We know the Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago, but little is known about when our other closest evolutionary relative went extinct.
Little is known about what the Denisovans looked like because they left few fossil traces of their time on Earth other than fragments found in Siberia and a jawbone discovered on the Western Highlands. Organ in 2019. In 2019, researchers in Israel said they had reconstructed the prehistoric man Denisovan skeleton – claiming with 85% accuracy – using DNA found in the little finger bone of a female 13-year-old girl died tens of thousands of years ago.
The work of Paabo and his team at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany still sheds light on our enigmatic ancestors.
By comparing DNA sequences, they found “gene flow” between both Denisovans and Neanderthals, and between Denisovans and modern humans.
In other words, before their extinction, the Denisovans also interbred with our species.
Up to six percent of Denisovan DNA is still found in humans today in Asia-Pacific and Southeast Asia, such as the natives of Australia, Melanesia and the Philippines. This suggests that our distant relatives roamed a vast expanse of East and South Eurasia.
In contrast, Neanderthals lived in Western Europe.
Scientists believe that the ancient ancestors of today’s Melanesians interbred with Denisovans from Southeast Asia, far from the icy mountains of Siberia and Tibet.
Evidence suggests the Denisovans spread as far as the tropics of Asia until a missing link – the tooth of a child at least 130,000 years old – was discovered in a cave in Laos in 2018. .
One of the greatest remaining mysteries is why modern humans succeeded in expanding and why Denisovans and Neanderthals became extinct after acclimatizing to Eurasian environments for several hundred thousand. five.
