The scientist has found that the DNA from ancient Siberian finger did not match any of modern human DNA or a Neadratal. To be more specific this is the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). When ancient-DNA expert Svante Pääbo gave his colleague Johannes Krause a sample of a 40,000-year-old human finger bone from a Siberian cave, he had only one question: Was its mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) that of
a Neandertal or a modern human?
It was neither. Evolutionary geneticists Pääbo and Krause, of the Max Planck Institutefor Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have apparently identified a new lineage of ancient human, the first time that this has been done using ancient DNA and not fossil bones.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Pääbo says. “I thought Johannes was pulling my leg.” The
complete sequence of mtDNA from the finger bone, reported online this week in Nature, suggests that Central Asia was occupied at that time not only by Neandertals and Homo sapiens but also by a third, previously
unknown hominin lineage. “This is the most exciting discovery to come from the ancient DNA field so far,” says Chris Tyler-Smith, a geneticist at the Sanger Institute in Hinxton, United Kingdom. “A stunning piece of
work,” says Terence Brown of the University of Manchester in the U.K.
The work complicates the human story, much as the discovery of the controversial H. floresiensis—a.k.a. the hobbit—has upset earlier and simpler views of early human migrations around the globe. If four hominins including the hobbit were alive about 40,000 years ago, “the amount of human biodiversity … was pretty remarkable,” says geneticist Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Pennsylvania. For now, Pääbo’s
team is not naming the new lineage.
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