To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (11660 ) 12/30/2010 11:07:59 AM From: Solon Read Replies (1) | Respond to DNA Sequencing is really helping scientists to unravel our past. Great stuff happening...New Type of Ancient Human Found in Siberia There can be little doubt that modern humans had their origins in Africa around 5–7 million years ago, and that they slowly populated the earth through a series of migrations. But it is at that point where the story becomes complicated. While it's fairly certain that the ancestors of modern humans left Africa somewhere around 75,000 years ago, roughly 275,000 years before that, an earlier group of ancestral humans left the continent and diverged. The group that reached Europe eventually became the Neanderthals that modern humans encountered (and eventually displaced) many millennia later. But new fossil evidence has scientists speculating that another group may have traveled to Asia and evolved into a different human subgroup that have been dubbed the Denisovans. Fossils in Siberia DNA Points to New Type of Human Denisovans Related to Modern Melanesians Since interbreeding likely took place, researchers still provisionally classify the Denisovans as humans, just as Neanderthals are, though there is a great deal of debate as to whether these two branches of the ancestral family tree should be considered new species or simply subspecies of modern humans. The saga of human evolution becomes ever more complex with each new find, and scientists are confident that DNA sequencing will be invaluable in helping to sort out the history of the species.suite101.com
