Denisovan DNA in the Genome of Early East Asians
Phoenix666 writes:
Denisovan DNA in the genome of early East Asians:
In 2006, miners discovered a hominin skullcap with peculiar morphological features in the Salkhit Valley of the Norovlin county in eastern Mongolia. It was initially referred to as Mongolanthropus and thought to be a Neandertal or even a Homo erectus. The remains of the "Salkhit" individual represent the only Pleistocene hominin fossil found in the country.
Ancient DNA extracted from the skullcap shows that it belonged to a female modern human who lived 34,000 ago and was more related to Asians than to Europeans. Comparisons to the only other early East Asian individual genetically studied to date, a 40,000-year-old male from Tianyuan Cave outside Beijing (China), show that the two individuals are related to each other. However, they differ insofar that a quarter of the ancestry of the Salkhit individual derived from western Eurasians, probably via admixture with ancient Siberians.
[...] "Interestingly, the Denisovan DNA fragments in these very old East Asians overlap with Denisovan DNA fragments in the genomes of present-day populations in East Asia but not with Denisovan DNA fragments in Oceanians. This supports a model of multiple independent mixture events between Denisovans and modern humans," says Massilani.
The evidence indicates there was substantial mixing across the Eurasian land mass even 35,000 years ago.
Journal Reference:
Dongju Zhang, Huan Xia, Fahu Chen, et al. Denisovan DNA in Late Pleistocene sediments from Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau [$], Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.abb6320)
Related:
Ancient skull a new window on human migrations, Denisovan meetings
Previously:
Evidence Found of Denisovans Interbreeding With Humans in Southeast Asia More Recently Than Thought
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