Confirmed: X-Women = Denisovans
Posted by: Loren Coleman on December 22nd, 2010
We were not alone.
Early reconstruction of the X-Woman.
Where she was found.
The X-Woman has been discussed before here, here, and here.
The news tonight is that three, er, four (with the Hobbits) fossil human-like beings existed, definitely, on Earth at the same time.
“The Neanderthal and Denisova population history may be roughly twice the length suggested in [the Nature] paper,” said University of Wisconsin — Madison anthropologist John Hawks, who was not involved with this study. “The ancestors [of the Denisovans] might be the original Homo erectus dispersal from Africa.”
DNA taken from this belonging to a young girl was found to be neither from early human nor Neanderthal, and was from a previously unknown species.
The Denisovans were similar in looks to Homo erectus, pictured, a species which dies out more than one million years ago.
Both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans started in Africa but, around the same time, the Neanderthals moved out to the west and into Europe, while the Denisovans headed East.
See these two dispatches, here and here.
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Loren Coleman no longer writes for Cryptomundo. His archived posts remain here at Cryptomundo.
Make that five members of the human family that coexisted at the same time –don’t forget Boskop man
i get nervous when people refer to human groups that our group interbred with as different species, when by definition they have to have been only different races. It sounds too much like old-style evolutionist ‘scientific racism’
The hominin branch of the tree of life is looking positively bushy.
If the denisova dna interpretation requires that there were another species then how many other species were out there and nowhere near a cave in which it conveniently and almost beyond belief happens to get a fragment of its remains preserved in a cave occupied by other ancient lineages of humans?
No doubt there is yet more to be revealed as more and more remote corners of our ancestral ranges come to light.
One of the things I find really interesting from this – and other – discoveries is what it means to researchers. Do you know how many boxes of bones there are in the museums that have never been fully examined? Just imagine that a tooth in a box somewhere labelled as Neanderthal gets looked at again and turns out to not be from a Neanderthal.