Oldest hominid DNA muddles family tree

摘要

An analysis of the oldest known sample of DNA from a member of the human evolutionary family raises surprising questions about relationships among far-flung populations of ancient hominids.Researchers extracted a nearly complete sample of mitochondrial DNA from a 400,000-year-old leg bone previously found in a cave in northern Spain. The DNA shows an unexpected hereditary link to the Denisovans, Neandertals' genetic cousins that lived in East Asia at least 44,000 years ago, say paleogeneti-cist Matthias Meyer of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues.