Back when our species was just arriving in Europe and Asia from Africa , there were already two groups of archaic hominins ( that ’s us and our extinct ancestors ) living there : the well - take Neanderthals of Europe and parts of Asia and the mystic Denisovans known only from a cave in southerly Siberia .
In the mid-1990s , thousands of bones and teeth were discovered in a cave call Sima de los Huesos , or “ pit of bones , ” in the Atapuerca Mountains of northern Spain . A few of the fogy , dating back around 430,000 years , looked a lot like rude Neanderthals . Some researchers think they belonged toHomo heidelbergensis , a species thought to have give hike to both Neanderthals and homo ; others think they belonged to members of the Denisovansbased on mitochondrial DNAfrom one of the Sima fossil thighbones ( call femur XIII ) . However , mitochondrial DNA only represent a fraction of the genome and , as it is inherit only from the mother , does n’t reflect a population ’s complete evolutionary history .
Now , Matthias Meyerof the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and workfellow have sequence nuclear desoxyribonucleic acid distil from multiple Sima specimen – the oldest atomic DNA ever sequenced from a member of the human sept , Sciencereports . Their determination put individuals from the stone hard on the Neanderthal evolutionary lineage . Theworkwas presented at theEuropean Society for the discipline of Human Evolutionmeeting in London this week .
The team isolate deoxyribonucleic acid from four Sima specimens : another femur fragment , an incisor , a molar and a scapula ( or articulatio humeri blade ) . They did n’t recover any meaningful genetic datum from the scapula , but they did manage to obtain up to three million bases of DNA sequences form the other three .
When they skim this DNA for marker found only in Neanderthals , Denisovans or forward-looking humans , they find that the nuclear genomes of those specimens were importantly more like to Neanderthals . “ Indeed , the Sima de los Huesos specimens are early Neanderthals or related to early Neanderthals , ” Meyer said at the encounter , according toScience . And that suggests the Neanderthal - Denisovan split materialise before 430,000 years ago .
