Elusive Denisovans Sighted in Oldest Human DNA

摘要

For 4 years, paleogeneticist Svante Paabo has been chasing a ghost species of ancient human. Known only by its DNA and three scrappy fossils from Denisova Cave in Siberia, this extinct lineage has left genetic traces in living Southeast Asians, so Paabo expected to find its DNA in bones from across Asia. He had come up empty. Now, his team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has finally found part of the broken Denisovan trail-not in some mysterious Asian fossil, but in a proto-Neandertal from Spain.