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They remain one of the most elusive groups of humans to have walked on earth. Evidence from the DNA traces left by Denisovans shows they lived on the Tibetan plateau, ­probably ­travelled to the Philippines and Laos in south Asia and might have made their way to northern China more than 100,000 years ago. They also interbred with modern humans...Their DNA, which was first found in samples from the Denisova cave in Siberia in 2010, provides most of our ­information about their existence.But recently scientists have pinpointed a strong candidate for the species to which the Denisovans might have belonged....

Whether you’re a morning person has long been tied to personality, but new research suggests DNA inherited from our extinct Neanderthal cousins ups the chance we’re early risers. Our circadian rhythms—the biological clocks inside our cells that time when we sleep and wake—are linked to countless genes. Now researchers say they have found that bits of genetic code passed down to some of us from Neanderthals relate to our sleeping habits in the present day. The study was published Thursday in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution. “We’ve found many Neanderthal variants that consistently associate with a propensity for being...

A gene from Denisovans makes people predisposed to mental health issues The gene was passed down to humans about 60,000 years ago in Asia Humans having sex with a now-extinct subspecies they met in Asia some 60,000 years ago could be the reason you have depression, a new study has claimed. Researchers discovered a gene variant linked to the crossbreeding of humans and Denisovans which they believe affects our mood. Those with the variant have lower levels of zinc in the body - a nutrient which studies increasingly show is associated with mood and happiness. Scientists said SLC30A9 is the...

...we find the now inhospitable and hyper-arid zone of the southern Jordan Rift Valley was frequently lush and well-watered in the past.Our evidence suggests this valley had a riverine and wetland zone that would have provided ideal passage... out of Africa and deep into the Levant and Arabia...Our findings from sedimentary sections ranging 5 to 12 metres in thickness showed ecosystem fluctuations over time, including cycles of dry and humid environments. We also found evidence for the presence of ancient rivers and wetlands.Luminescence dating showed the sedimentary environments formed between 125,000 and 43,000 years ago, suggesting there had been multiple...

A team of paleontologists... analyzed the fossilized jawbone, partial skull and some leg bones of a hominin dated to 300,000 years ago.The fossils were excavated at a site in Hualongdong, in what is now a part of East China. They were subsequently subjected to both a morphological and a geometric assessment, with the initial focus on the jawbone, which exhibited unique features—a triangular lower edge and a unique bend.The research team suggests that the unique features of the jawbone resemble those of both modern humans and Late Pleistocene hominids. But they also found that it did not have a chin,...

When modern humans first migrated from Africa to the tropical islands of the southwest Pacific, they encountered unfamiliar people and new pathogens. But their immune systems may have picked up some survival tricks when they mated with the locals—the mysterious Denisovans who gave them immune gene variants that might have protected the newcomers’ offspring from local diseases. Some of these variants still persist in the genomes of people living in Papua New Guinea today, according to a new study.Researchers have known for a decade that living people in Papua New Guinea and other parts of Melanesia, a subregion of the...

...Before high-throughput sequencing became commonplace, the aDNA field relied on polymerase chain reaction (PCR) techniques to sequence a few specific DNA fragments. Researchers could only extract a very limited amount of DNA information with this technology and had trouble distinguishing genuine aDNA from contaminant DNA.To complement advances in sequencing, aDNA researchers have also developed improved methods of DNA library construction to better reflect the characteristics of aDNA. Among these methods, partial uracil-DNA glycosylase (UDG) treatments and single-stranded DNA library construction are two of the most important...The application of aDNA technology goes far beyond the ancient human genome, of course. Paleomolecular...

Using the latest scientific methods, Tom Higham and Katerina Douka from the University of Vienna want to solve a great mystery of human evolution: Why are we the only humans left? Higham and Douka were the first ones to find a first-generation offspring of two different types of human. They continuously publish new results in high impact journals, most recently in Science Advances.Our ancient cousins are more present in modern human DNA than we thought: Modern humans possess a small proportion of genes from archaic groups like Neanderthals. Every person having a European or Asian background has an average of...

A molar discovered in a cave in Laos shows where the enigmatic Denisovans could have interbred with the ancestors of modern humans. A tooth found inside of a mountain cave in Laos has solved one of the biggest scientific mysteries of the Denisovans, a branch of ancient humans that disappeared roughly 50,000 years ago. Since 2010, when Denisovan teeth and finger bones were first discovered, DNA testing has revealed that the enigmatic hominins were among the ancestors of people alive today in Australia and the Pacific. But scientists didn’t understand how the Denisovans, whose scant remains had been found only...

Deep in the forests of Laos, in a cave in the Annamite Mountains, lay a single child's tooth. That tooth – an unassuming molar - could be from a mysterious species of human we know little about, and of which few remains are known to exist. "Analyses of the internal structure of the molar in tandem with palaeoproteomic analyses of the enamel indicate that the tooth derives from a young, likely female, Homo individual," researchers write in a new study. The tooth, from the Tam Ngu Hao 2 cave, "most likely represents a Denisovan", the researchers say. Denisovans are an...

Denisova Cave in Siberia, Russia (Cheburgenator/ CC-BY-SA-4.0/Wikimedia Commons) =============================================================================== Nobody knows who she was, just that she was different: a teenage girl from over 50,000 years ago of such strange uniqueness she looked to be a 'hybrid' ancestor to modern humans that scientists had never seen before. Only recently, researchers have uncovered evidence she wasn't alone. In a 2019 study analysing the complex mess of humanity's prehistory, scientists used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify an unknown human ancestor species that modern humans encountered – and shared dalliances with – on the long trek out of Africa millennia ago. "About 80,000...

The mysterious Denisovans were only formally identified about a decade ago, when a single finger bone unearthed from a cave in Siberia clued scientists in to the ancient existence of a kind of archaic hominin we'd never before seen.But that's only one side of the story. The truth is, modern humans had in fact already encountered Denisovans a long time before this. We crossed paths with them an eternity ago.So far back, in fact, that we forgot about them entirely. Especially as they – and other archaic humans, such as the Neanderthals – faded into the unliving past, and Homo...

In a new study, scientists from the CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, and the French Blood Establishment (EFS) have examined the previously sequenced genomes of one Denisovan and three Neandertal females who lived 100,000 to 40,000 years ago, in order to identify their blood groups and consider what they may reveal about human’s evolutionary history. Of the 40-some known blood group systems, the team concentrated on the seven usually considered for blood transfusion purposes, the most common of which are the ABO (determining the A, B, AB, and O blood types) and Rh systems.The findings bolster previous hypotheses but also offer new...

This Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2003 file photo shows a reconstructed Neanderthal skeleton, right, and a modern human skeleton on display at the Museum of Natural History in New York.What makes humans unique? Scientists have taken another step toward solving an enduring mystery with a new tool that may allow for more precise comparisons between the DNA of modern humans and that of our extinct ancestors. Just 7% of our genome is uniquely shared with other humans, and not shared by other early ancestors, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances. "That's a pretty small percentage," said...

The results of the study showed no evidence of interbreeding. Nevertheless, the team were able to confirm previous results showing high levels of Denisovan ancestry in the region.[Yes, the article really does say that. High levels of ancestry, but without any evidence of interbreeding.]

A growing number of ancient DNA studies on Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens suggest intertwined evolutionary and population histories, including several admixture events between early modern and archaic humans. However, ancient nuclear and mtDNA sequences revealed phylogenetic discrepancies between the three groups that are hard to explain. For example, autosomal genomes show that Neanderthals and Denisovans are sister groups that split from modern humans more than 550,000 years ago. However, all but the earliest Neanderthal mtDNA samples are far more similar to those of modern humans than to those from Denisovans. These studies suggest that Neanderthals originally carried a Denisovan-like...

[Ghost] DNA from an unknown ancient ancestor of humans that once bred with Denisovans still exists among the genomes of people today, a study has revealed. The different branches of the human family tree have interbred and swapped genes -- a processes known as 'introgression' -- on numerous occasions... Experts from the US found that some three per cent of the Neanderthal genome came from interbreeding with another ancient human group 300,000 years ago... The researchers used the algorithm to look at genomes from two Neanderthals, a Denisovan and two African humans. Alongside finding that a small proportion of the...

The last 10 years have transformed the evidence concerning the early origins and evolution of Neanderthal populations. Genetic comparisons of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancient DNA suggest that the common ancestor of these populations separated from African ancestors of modern humans prior to 600,000 years ago, followed by a rapid differentiation in Eurasia. Later, additional episodes of gene flow brought genes into Neanderthal populations, including the mtDNA clade carried by all later Neanderthals. Yet, a number of western Eurasian fossil samples from the time between 600,000 and 100,000 years ago are difficult to accommodate within the category of "Neanderthals", including European...

One of these Neanderthal genomes was from an individual (Vindija 33) found in Vindija Cave in Croatia, whereas the other Neanderthal genome (Denisova 5 or the Altai Neanderthal) and the Denisovan genome (Denisova 3) both came from specimens discovered in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains... The researchers found that Chagyrskaya 8 lived 80,000 years ago, about 30,000 years after the Denisova 5 Neanderthal and 30,000 years before the Vindija 33 Neanderthal. They also found that the Chagyrskaya Neanderthal was a female and that she was more closely related to Vindija 33 and other Neanderthals in western Eurasia than to...

Ancient humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans were genetically closer than polar bears and brown bears, and so, like the bears, were able to easily produce healthy, fertile hybrids according to a study, led by the University of Oxford's School of Archaeology... The long history of matings between Neanderthals, humans, and Denisovans has only recently been demonstrated through the analysis of ancient genomes. The ability of mammalian species, including ancient humans, to produce fertile hybrid offspring has been hard to predict, and the relative fertility of the hybrids remains an open question. Some geneticists have even said that Neanderthals and humans were...