Oldest Human DNA Contains Clues To Mysterious Species 93
sciencehabit writes "Analysis of the oldest known genetic material ever to be recovered from an early human reveals an unexpected chapter in the story of human evolution. Researchers extracted mitochondrial DNA from the femur of a 400,000-year-old hominin found in the Sima de los Huesos ('pit of bones'), an underground cave in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain. Because the early hominins looked a little like Neanderthals, researchers expected their mitochondrial DNA to share a common ancestor. However, mitochondrial DNA from the Spanish hominin was found to share a common ancestor with an enigmatic eastern Eurasian sister group to the Neanderthals, the Denisovans."
Re:underground cave... (Score:5, Informative)
"underground cave" is there another kind?
Man Cave
Re:Very interesting, but (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hominin? (Score:5, Informative)
Hominin a subtribe of homonids
Homonids is great apes thus humans gorillas chimpanzea orangutans
Homonin are all those related closer to humans than chimpanzees thus neantherthals etc
Re:Happy Wednesday from The Golden Girls! (Score:5, Informative)
We were human 100000 years ago? Weren't we human-LIKE way back then? I mean, denisovians and Neanderthals weren't human, were they?
Well, if you're talking about the conventional usage of "human" in scientific circles, the answer is: Yes, they were; they just weren't modern humans.
But "human" really isn't a technical term; For that you want something like "Homo" or "hominin", depending on how far back in the tree you want to describe. The term "human" is used informally to mean just about any critters later than the split from the Pan (chimpanzee) branch. It's used when you don't want to be too precise about such things.
OTOH, "human" is widely used in common speech to refer to anyone "not like us". Sometimes it means "white people", especially in writings from before the 20th century. But you don't much hear such usages in scientific settings. You do see it a lot in media coverage of science, but then it means whatever the journalist thinks it means.