Scientists have recreated the oldest human DNA from a 400,000-year-old femur found in northern Spain.
German anthropologists have reconstructed the oldest genome of an ancient man from the genus Homo, who lived 400 thousand years ago in the Spanish cave of Sima de los Huesos.
A group of scientists from the Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology under the leadership of Svante Paabo managed, thanks to a new method of sequencing the Paleogenomes, to recover and read mitochondrial DNA isolated from the hominid femur. Comparing it with DNA of Denisovans, Neanderthals and humans, scientists were surprised to find that the inhabitant of the cave was much closer genetically not to Neanderthals, as one might expect, but to Denisovans who lived about 30-50 thousand years ago in Siberia.
Heidelberg Human Skull (without lower jaw)
- The fact that the mitochondrial DNA of the inhabitant of this cave carries traces of the Denisovans, and not the Neanderthals, is extremely unexpected, since some of the features of his skeleton are typically Neanderthal. We hope that further study of these remains will help clarify the relationship between the cave dweller, Neanderthals and Denisovans, said Mathias Meyer and Juan-Luis Arsuaga of the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
This discovery gave rise to many new questions, the answers to which Paabo and his colleagues plan to find in their next works.