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Discovery of the Denisovans

Have you heard about the Denisovans?  They're not Cro-Magnons, and they're not Neanderthals.  They are...The Third Species!  Dun-dun-DUN!

Well, perhaps that's being a bit dramatic.  What's true is that scientists found a pinkie bone and a tooth in a Siberian cave.  They were able to get well-preserved mitochondrial and nuclear DNA from the bones, which they compared to Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal DNA, and much to their surprise, found that the new DNA is as different from Neanderthal DNA as Neanderthal DNA is from that of modern people.  From a pinkie bone!  Science is awesome!  What's doubly cool about this find is that this ancient population seems to have contributed DNA to modern peoples, particularly those of Melanesian descent (people living on islands of the coast of Australia).  

Here's the original article, from Nature.com.

For a more detailed, biological and statistical analysis of the Denisovan data, may I present the blog post of Prof. John Hawks.  Really, it's quite thorough and very interesting.

Neanderthals eating salads?  Whaaaaa?

Speaking of Neanderthals, it now seems as though they weren't necessarily the dedicated carnivores of data past.  Analysis of teeth plaque (from fossilized teeth!) shows consumption of a variety of grains and plants, and scientists can even tell that some of those grains were prepared with heat.  Proof that Neanderthals ate their veggies (and carbs), and cooked them like we do.  (Perhaps not a huge, earth-shattering reveal, but it's always nice to have actual, hard data to back up your common sense.)  Which means the hypothesis that Neanderthals might have been pushed towards extinction by their dietary dependence on large game no longer seems fits quite so nicely.  (Personally, I'm betting it was a zombie plague.  See below.) 

USA Today reported the finding.

A Neanderthal Donner Party

Speaking of carnivorous diets, the notion that Neanderthals practiced cannibalism in one form or another has been around for a while.  New data from the remains of 12 Neanderthal individuals found in a cave in Spain not only prop up this sensationalist side to Paleolithic culture (Zombie plague.  I'm telling you), but also suggest other exciting cultural insights.  Mitochondrial DNA from the remains show that all the males in the group share a close maternal ancestor, whereas most of the females have different maternal lineages.  Were Neanderthals patrilocal?  (Where men stay close to their mothers and get wives from outside their group.)  It's so neat to think that cultural behaviors could show up in the gene pool.  On the other hand, it's been shown that Neanderthals in general are lacking in genetic diversity, so the fact that many of the individuals in that group are closely related may not be the bombshell it first seems.

Article from livescience.com
Analysis and caveats from John Hawks

Everything we know is wrong.  (Or, everything they know is wrong.)

While we're trending towards sensationalism, here's a fun little piece: a tooth!  A tooth, found in Israel that the discoverers believe to be modern human, and 400,000 years old.  They haven't done any lab tests to confirm either part of that claim, but the tooth looks the right shape and size for anatomically modern man, and it was found in sediment layers that date to 400,000 years ago (so it's not like they're just making it up).  Currently, the oldest accepted remains of modern humans are African, and about 195,000 years old (BBC News), so if verified (which seems unlikely, odds are it's Neanderthal or some other earlier form of Homo, maybe even a small erectus), this tooth would double the age of our species, alter our place of origin and throw a real monkey wrench into the Mitochondrial Eve hypothesis, which, as of August 2010, traces back modern human DNA (via standard mutation rates) pretty reliably to an origin point in Africa, 200,000 years ago (sciencedaily.com).  How can a thing exist before its lineage even existed?  (Time travel, of course.) 

From an AP report on yahoo.

In conclusion, Ringo Starr is an early human ancestor.

...For us geeks, anyway.  If I am badly behind-the-times with this, well, forgive my lapse, but check out Celestia, guys.  Put it on your compy (whatever OS you're using, they've got a version for it) and feel the godlike awesomeness explode inside your brain.  It's SPACE!  In your COMPUTER!  Like a Google Earth for all of the known universe.  Look at this little teaser.  NASA uses it, and best yet, it's open source.  Which means, yes, you can not only check out Quaoar, Bacchus, Triton, Titan and M 31, but you can get nifty add-ons that will show you where Spock's homeworld of Vulcan could be.  FOR SERIAL.  Join me in a real-science-squee, everybody!