Hey

I have a theory -

Ya know this is in an extremely wooded and wild area - and mountainous and cold

Dare I say ?????

Could this new 'species' be the ancestor of or in fact be - a Yeti ? or Big Foot or Sasquatch?

Could this be ancient proof of our elusive furry cousin ??

wow

maybe ?? just a thought ?

Peace, Hugs, and Purrs,
Carolyn Rose Goyda
Missouri, USA
rosegojda@aol.com

FT.com print article

Gene research reveals fourth human species

By Clive Cookson in London

Published: March 24 2010 18:45 | Last updated: March 24 2010 18:45

A fourth type of hominid, besides Neanderthals, modern humans and the tiny "hobbit", was living as recently as 40,000 years ago, according to research published in the journal Nature.

The discovery by Svante Pääbo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, is based on DNA sequences from a finger bone fragment discovered in a Siberian cave.

It further enriches the scientific picture of human life in the recent geological past. "Forty thousand years ago the planet was more crowded than we thought," said Terry Brown, an expert in ancient DNA at Manchester University.

Until recently scientists believed there were just two members of the genus Homo alive at the time: Neanderthals whose ancestors left Africa 400,000 years ago, and modern humans, who left about 50,000 years ago. The picture changed in 2003 when archaeologists found remains of a third species, the tiny "hobbit", which had survived on the Indonesian island of Flores until 14,000 years ago.

The identification of a fourth species is potentially more significant because it was not an isolated population but lived in the centre of the Eurasian continent, where Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens were also present.

The Leipzig team extracted DNA from a child's finger bone, which Russian archaeologists discovered with other hominid bone fragments in Denisova Cave, a well known Neanderthal site in Russia's Altai Mountains.

The site's exceptional cold helped preserve enough DNA to be read with the latest gene sequencing technology.

The scientists first decoded the "mitochondrial" DNA. It was human but, to their astonishment, very different from Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals.

The differences imply that the ancestors of the still unnamed Siberian hominid diverged from the human family tree about 1m years ago, well before the split between Neanderthals and modern hominids about 500,000 years ago. The results also suggest a previously unsuspected migration out of Africa about 1m years ago, said Prof Pääbo.

He expects within months to decode the hominid's "nuclear" DNA. That will be compared with the modern human and Neanderthal genomes.

Until more of the new hominid's DNA has been analysed – or larger pieces of bone discovered – it will not be possible to say much about its physical or cultural characteristics, or how it interacted with other human species.

But one thing is clear: it must have clothed itself in thick furs to withstand the Siberian winter, said Prof Pääbo: "It would have been a bit colder 40,000 years ago than today, and it was -40°C when we went there this January.

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Possible new human ancestor found in Siberia | Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Genetic material pulled from a pinky finger bone found in a Siberian cave shows a new and unknown type of pre-human lived alongside modern humans and Neanderthals, scientists reported on Wednesday.

Science

The creature, nicknamed "Woman X" for the time being, could have lived as recently as 30,000 years ago and appears only distantly related to modern humans or Neanderthals, the researchers reported.

"It really just looked like something we had never seen before," Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told a telephone briefing.

"It was a sequence that looked something like humans but really quite different."

Writing in Nature, Krause and colleagues said they sequenced DNA from the mitochondria, a part of the cell, which is passed down virtually intact from a woman to her children. They compared it to DNA from humans, Neanderthals and apes.

The sequence indicates the hominin's line diverged about a million years ago from the line that gave rise to both humans and Neanderthals and that split about 500,000 years ago.

That makes it younger than Homo erectus, the pre-human that spread out of Africa to much of the world about 1.9 million years ago.

"It is some new creature that has not been on our radar screen so far," said Svaante Paabo, a colleague of Krause's who specializes in analyzing ancient DNA.

And it would have lived near to both modern humans and Neanderthals. "There were at least three ... different forms of humans in this area 40,000 years ago," Paabo said.

Krause and Paabo are careful not to name the creature a new species just yet. They are now working to sequence nuclear DNA -- the DNA that makes up most of the genetic code, which will tell a great deal more about "Woman X".

NEW SCIENCE OF EVOLUTION

The genetic sequence tells scientists little about what the creature would have looked like or whether it interacted with other humans living in the Altai mountains of Siberia, where the pinky finger bone was found.

The work, done using a DNA sequencer made by Illumina Ltd, suggests a new way is opening to identify the ancestors of humanity. Krause and Paabo had only a tiny fragment of bone to work with and cannot reconstruct a skeleton in the time-honored manner of most paleontologists.

But there may be more there. The cold, dry conditions of the Altai mountains preserve the DNA. Stone tools also have been found in the area, as well as the bones of woolly mammoths but only tantalizing fragments of human bone and teeth.

Researchers have sequenced DNA from mammoths frozen in Siberia and the same team has sequenced DNA from Neanderthals.

Paabo and Krause said it is theoretically possible the creature is related to another potential third species of human -- Homo floresiensis, nicknamed "hobbit" -- which lived on an island in modern-day Indonesia about 17,000 years ago.

The team has tried without success to get DNA from hobbit bones. Most skeletons of pre-humans have been found in warm places such as Africa, but hot, wet conditions break down DNA."