Denisovan fossil finger points to the timing of Neanderthal evolution
Enlarge / The two fragments of Denisova 3's fingertip, reunited in digital form. (credit: Bennett et al. 2019)
A group of anthropologists finally put back together a Denisovan finger bone unearthed in 2009, and it pointed to something surprising. Denisovan fingers looked more like ours than like Neanderthals', even though DNA shows that Denisovans are more closely related to Neanderthals. That suggests Neanderthals evolved subtle differences in the shape of their finger bones (phalanges) sometime after they branched off from Denisovans around 410,000 years ago.
DNA can tell us a lot about how species are related to each other, but we still need to look at the bones themselves to understand how and when particular traits changed. The combination of DNA and skeletal evidence can help us understand the details that differentiated modern humans from our nearest hominin relatives-and the environmental and other forces that shaped those differences.
The fickle fate of a fingerBack in 2010, DNA from one fragment of this finger bone (the proximal end, or the one closest to the body) revealed the existence of another hominin species that we'd been missing all this time. The Denisovans were named for Denisova Cave in Siberia, where anthropologists unearthed the bone. It's the tip of the right pinky finger of a 13-year-old Denisovan girl who died 50,000 years ago. Her DNA sequence has become the source of most of what we now know about her enigmatic people, as fossil finds have been surprisingly rare for such a wide-ranging, long-lived species.
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