https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01090-3?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_cam...

"A fossilized jawbone found off the coast of Taiwan more than 20 years ago belonged to a group of ancient humans, called the Denisovans, first identified in a Siberian cave.

The finding, published today in Science1, is the result of time-consuming work to extract ancient proteins from the fossil. It also expands the known geographical range of the group, from colder, high-altitude regions to warmer climates.

***

"The lower jawbone, with four teeth intact, is called Penghu 1 and was dredged up by fishing crews from the Penghu channel, 25 kilometres off the west coast of Taiwan. Penghu 1 was donated to Taiwan’s National Museum of Natural Science in Taichung after researchers recognized its significance as coming from an ancient human relative2. But the identity of that unknown relative remained a mystery, until now.

***

"The team identified several degraded fragments, two of which bore specific amino-acid sequence variations matching those seen in the genetic sequences of a Denisovan finger bone3 found in the Denisova Cave in southern Siberia in 2008. The researchers could also tell that the jawbone came from a male Denisovan.

"It’s the second location that molecular evidence from ancient proteins has definitively linked fossil remains to the Denisovans. The first was in a cave in Xiahe, Tibet where proteins from a jawbone4 and then a rib bone were determined to be from Denisovans.

"Pinning down an exact age for the Penghu fossil is challenging because scientists do not have samples of the sediment it was buried in.

“'One can only say it’s older than 50,000” years, says Rainer Grün, a geochronologist at the Australian National University in Canberra, who dated the fossil in 2015 and subsequently reanalysed the data5.

"The Xiahe 1 mandible is at least 160,000 years old, and material from the Denisova cave indicates that Denisovans lived in Siberia between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago. At that time, sea levels were lower and the Chinese mainland was connected to Taiwan.

"Enrico Cappellini, a molecular biologist at the University of Copenhagen, says that the discovery of Denisovan remains further east than Tibet is not surprising. Modern-day human populations across the Pacific harbour Denisovan gene sequences from interbreeding between Denisovans and Homo sapiens. Indeed, one of the sequence variants that marked Penghu 1 as a Denisovan is present in more than 20% of the modern-day population of the Philippines.

"Kelso says that traces of Denisovan DNA found in modern-day human populations suggest that there were multiple populations of the ancient hominin. The latest data also show slight differences in protein sequences between the Taiwanese, Tibetan and Siberian Denisovan fossils."
Comment: Like sapiens Denisovans migrated all over.

https://psyche.co/ideas/this-is-what-a-neanderthal-conversation-would-have-sounded-like...

"Despite how much we know about them, the Neanderthals remain an enigma – so similar to us, and yet so different. The most striking contrast is the relative absence of technological progression throughout Neanderthal existence.

"This is the puzzle posed by Neanderthals: why have we made so much more technological progress than they did, despite their skill at flaking stone and making tools? Relatedly, why did our art develop from geometric designs at 100,000 years ago to figurative cave paintings by 38,000 years, while Neanderthal ‘art’ remained restricted to a few highly contested scratches and blobs of pigment for more than 300,000 years?

***

"Content words can also be divided into iconic and arbitrary words. Iconic words capture a sensory impression of their referent. They include onomatopoeias (such as ‘quack’ and ‘plop’) and words that mimic the size, movement or texture of an object. Languages throughout the world today commonly refer to small, quick things using small words with high front vowels, such as ‘fly’ and ‘bee’, and large things with long words with low back vowels, such as ‘hippopotamus’ and ‘enormous’. Iconic words are found in all modern-day languages and dominate the lexicons of young children. They are, however, poor at conveying detail and insufficient for our needs. That is why we need arbitrary words. These have meanings agreed by convention. A four-legged canine, for instance, can be called a ‘dog’, ‘hund’, ‘chien’ and many other things, depending on the language being spoken.
***

"The evidence that Neanderthals had some types of words comes partly from their skeletal remains. Meticulous anatomical studies show that their vocal tracts were nearly identical to ours – overturning previous views that they were unable to generate enough vowels for spoken language. The shape of Neanderthal ear bones and cochlea show that their auditory tracts were also not significantly different to our own, which have been tuned by evolution to the sound frequencies used in speech.

"This isn’t to say that the Neanderthals would have sounded the same as we do. They had larger noses, giving their vowels and consonants more nasal qualities. They also had larger lung capacities, enabling them to speak with longer and louder utterances before needing to draw breath, and allowing their stop consonants (their Bs, Gs, Ks, Ps and Ts) to be even more forceful – or plosive, to use a linguistic term – than ours.

"What types of words were they using? Iconic words for certain. These provided the evolutionary bridge between the barks and grunts of the 6-million-year-old chimpanzee-like ancestor (of all human types) and the arbitrary words that now dominate our vocabulary. Iconic words were likely used by Homo erectus by 1.6 million years ago, these being required for communicating about the hunting and scavenging they undertook. Iconic words alone, however, were insufficient for the more sophisticated and varied hunting done by Neanderthals. They would have needed to distinguish between different types of large animals and types of small animals, types of stone and types of wood. Such fine distinctions would require the use of hybrid and fully arbitrary words.

***

"We know from both archaeological and genomic evidence that the Neanderthals lived in particularly small communities. This suggests that their languages likely had the same (and probably exaggerated) features of those so-called esoteric languages found in small speech communities today. It also implies that there would have been a multitude of distinctive Neanderthal languages.

***

"Anthropology, neuroscience and genomics have converged on the view that Neanderthals’ brains had a different internal structure than ours. More of their brain matter was devoted to visual processing, restricting what was available for other tasks, such as language. They also had a smaller and differently shaped cerebellum, a brain structure that contributes to language processing, production and fluency. Moreover, several of the genetic changes that occurred in the H sapiens lineage after our split from the Neanderthals influenced our neural networks.

***

"For instance, they did not design hunting weapons for killing specific types of animals in specific circumstances, as we find among modern-day hunter-gatherers. To do so requires bringing together what one knows about particular animals, including their physiology and behaviour, with what one knows about artefacts – how to flake stone and sharpen sticks. The Neanderthals did not blend such knowledge, despite having considerable need to do so. The injuries they frequently suffered from close-encounter hunting using thrusting spears could have been avoided by using bows and arrows or thrown spears.

"Being unable to fully connect their semantic clusters of words, the Neanderthals were unable to make use of metaphor – the use of one domain of thought to inform about another. Metaphors have long been recognised as an essential feature of modern-day language for enabling innovative and creative thought."

Comment: that they lacked higher order thinking is why we succeeded, and they failed.

https://phys.org/news/2023-06-unseen-industry-neanderthals-bone-tools.html

"Were anatomically modern humans the only ones who knew how to turn bone into tools? A discovery by an international team at the Chez-Pinaud-Jonzac Neanderthal site settles the question. Published in PLOS ONE, it sheds light on a little known aspect of Neanderthal technology.

***

"Current studies have shown that bone tools are as numerous as flint ones. Moreover, their diversity provides evidence for a genuine industry that consists not only of retouchers but also of cutting tools, scrapers, chisels and smoothers, used for various activities and on multiple materials. These bone tools are identifiable based on traces of manufacture and use present on their surfaces as well as within the tools themselves using X-ray microtomography. Unlike examples made by modern humans that are generally shaped by scraping and abrasion, these tools were primarily made by percussion.

"The discovery of a bone industry at Chez-Pinaud-Jonzac is consistent with evidence uncovered a few years earlier by the same team at the Neanderthal site of Chagyrskaya, in the Siberian Altai. These two sites, located on either side of the Neanderthal range, testify to the fact that, like modern humans, Neanderthals made and used bone tools for their daily needs. They had the know-how to process bone using their own techniques and for their own purposes. Bone tools represent a new means for exploring and understanding Neanderthal technology."

Comment: more evidence of how smart the Neanderthals were.

https://phys.org/news/2023-05-neanderthals-synthetic-material-underground-distillation....

"Researchers at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and colleagues in Germany have taken a closer look at the birch tar used to affix Neanderthal tools and found a much more complex technique for creating the adhesive than previously considered.

***

"Synthetic material manufacturing remains a significant aspect of our cognitive advantage over other animals, as it requires sentient thinking, planning and comprehension of our actions to convert raw materials through a learned process.

"The Tübingen study illustrates that modern humans are not alone in this ability and were not the first to reach this mental milestone. The birch tar used by Neanderthals predates any known adaptation by modern humans by 100,000 years. The sticky material was used as an adhesive backing to connect stone to bone and wood in tools and weapons, with the added benefit of being water-resistant and resistant to organic decomposition.

***

"Through a comparative chemical analysis of two birch tar pieces from Germany and a large reference birch tar collection made with Stone Age techniques, the researchers found that Neanderthals did not simply find birch tar after a fire, nor did they use the simplest manufacturing method.

"Instead, researchers have discovered that the Neanderthals who made the German birch tar used the most efficient method with a stepwise oxygen-restricted distillation process of underground heating to extract the synthetic adhesive.

"According to the authors, "This degree of complexity is unlikely to have been invented spontaneously." Suggesting that the technique would have started with simpler methods and been developed into the more complex process by experimentation.

***

"Oxygen availability at the time of extraction left a clear marker on the experimental tars, creating a signature that clearly separated above-ground from below-ground methods. The ancient artifacts matched the below-ground manufacturing process. Both ancient tar artifacts and the below-ground experiments showed some soil mineral interaction and were free from soot-related carbons, unlike the above-ground techniques.

"Underground transformative techniques are trickier to execute than above-ground techniques because some elements cannot be observed or corrected after the procedure begins requiring a more precise set-up procedure.

"The evidence for cognitively complex Neanderthals has only increased in recent years, as archaeological evidence reveals many of the technological firsts thought to be modern human inventions were already in use among Neanderthals. At this point, it may benefit anyone who prefers thinking of human intelligence as an exceptional uniqueness to concede that Neanderthals were humans too."

Comment: more evidence that the Neanderthals were pretty bright fellows. Underground distillation is an advanced technique not suited to the sand box.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/palaeontology/tightening-the-dragnet-on-denisovans/?...

"In a study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, a team – led by population geneticist João Teixeira at the University of Adelaide in Australia – has attempted to nail down the identity of these enigmatic ancient humans by using AI to probe deep into the DNA of modern people of southeast Asia.

***

"Denisovans are known only from a few sparse remains, including DNA from 50,000-year-old Siberian finger bone and teeth, as well as collagen proteins from a 160,000-year-old jaw fragment in Tibet. Intriguingly, these bits of bone and teeth don’t match any of the known fossils in the human family tree.

***

"Denisovans aren’t just some curious relic of our past – we still carry significant chunks of their DNA today, which suggests they interbred with modern humans as recently as 55,000–30,000 years ago. Genetic studies reveal very little Denisovan DNA in modern Europeans and Asians (less than 0.1%), but high percentages (around 4%) in New Guinea and Australia and the Mamanwa from the Philippines, people with ancestry from the traditional hunter-gatherers of the Asia-Pacific. (For comparison, Neanderthal DNA is found in all populations outside Africa at 1–3%.) This suggests the most recent trysts between Denisovans and modern humans took place in New Guinea and Australia.

***

"To test if any of these super-archaics might be Denisovans, Teixeira and team trained an AI to use a Hidden Markov Model to “walk” along the DNA code, sniffing for two-million-year-old DNA. Thanks to the efforts of Herawati Sudoyo at the Eijkman Institute for Molecular Biology in Jakarta, who painstakingly gathered tissue samples from isolated populations ranging from tiny islands to the remote highlands of New Guinea, the AI was able to probe the genomes of 200 people from ISEA – populations that seem to have acquired their Denisovan DNA as recently as 30,000 years ago. This needle-in-a-haystack search method can detect traces of super-archaic code that represent 0.1% of the DNA – “one in a thousand ancestors”, emphasises Teixeira.

***

"The verdict?

"Inconclusive.

"A faint whiff of two-million-year-old super-archaic DNA was identified, but it wasn’t strong enough to convince the authors this was introduced by a hominin down under. It may have been a “methodological artefact”: a leftover signature from the mingling between Denisovans and a super-archaic in the northern hemisphere, possibly H. erectus – a finding which others like Cornell University’s Melissa Hubisz have reported.

"Either way, the authors agree there is no conclusive evidence for a new super-archaic signature in people of ISEA.

***
"But if this study was inconclusive, where does this leave the hunt for the Denisovans?

"The authors are somewhat divided. Most say the evidence does not support the possibility that the island pygmies or hulking H. erectus are Denisovans. One suggestion is to keep searching the little-explored caves of ISEA for the remains of Denisovans. Sulawesi is the hot favourite. It has stone tools dating back 200,000–100,000 years ago, as well the world’s oldest cave paintings.

"A convincing fossil candidate should look more archaic than modern humans but not as archaic as the island hobbits – and it should have hung around till the moderns arrived about 50,000 years ago."

Comment: Denisovans sure got around. Fossils must be in some unexplored cave waiting to be discovered.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/first-denisovan-dna-outside-siberia-found-tibetan-p...

"Denisovan mitochondrial DNA extracted from sediment layers in Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau indicates that these humanlike folk inhabited the high-altitude site roughly 100,000 years ago and again around 60,000 years ago, say geoarchaeologist Dongju Zhang of Lanzhou University, China, and her colleagues. These are the first examples of Denisovan DNA found outside of Siberia’s Denisova Cave (SN: 12/16/19).

"Cave sediment possibly dating from 50,000 to 30,000 years ago also yielded Denisovan mitochondrial DNA, the scientists report in the Oct. 30 Science. If further research confirms that age estimate, it raises the likelihood that Denisovans survived on the Tibetan Plateau long enough to encounter the first humans to reach those heights as early as 40,000 years ago.

"In that case, ancient humans new to the region’s thin air may have acquired advantageous genetic traits for that environment by mating with resident Denisovans. Present-day Tibetans carry a Denisovan gene variant that aids high-altitude survival (SN: 7/2/14), although it’s not clear if interbreeding occurred on the Tibetan Plateau.

***

"In the new study, Denisovan mitochondrial DNA at Baishiya Karst Cave — found in sediment layers that also contained stone tools and pieces of animal bones — displayed close links to mitochondrial Denisovan DNA at Denisova Cave, located about 2,800 kilometers northwest of the Tibetan Plateau site. Overall, the new findings suggest “that Denisovan populations were widespread in eastern Eurasia and had adapted to the Tibetan Plateau for a long time,” Zhang says.

***

"A second study in the same issue of Science supports that idea. Nuclear DNA extracted from fossils of two ancient Asian Homo sapiens — one dating to around 34,000 years ago in Mongolia and the other to roughly 40,000 years ago in China (SN: 1/21/13) — includes segments inherited from a specific line of Denisovans, says a team led by paleogeneticist Diyendo Massilani of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Those genetic segments are found in present-day mainland Asians but are distinct from Denisovan DNA that modern Papuans and Aboriginal Australians apparently inherited from ancestors who interbred with another Denisovan population, the scientists report."

Comment: These guys were all over Asia.

dhw: Usual problem: please explain why a God who specially designs whatever he wants to specially design might have found it necessary to specially design all kinds of hominins and homos before specially designing the only homo he wanted. You have admitted in the past that you have “no idea”, but perhaps you have now worked out an answer.

NB I accept the history – all these beings evolved. But even if I were to accept your fixed belief that your God’s only purpose was to create H.sapiens, I would argue (one of my logical hypotheses) that all the different hominins and homos suggest experimentation, as opposed to a God who knew exactly what he wanted and was in total control. And there is nothing “weak” or “confused” about knowing what you want and experimenting in order to get it.

DAVID: A God who has to experiment is obviously weak.

dhw: If you think that your first cause God is “weak” because he doesn’t know in advance every single detail of something that has never existed before, then so be it.

DAVID: That is not what I wrote. You want Him to use experimentation. My God knows exactly what He wants and has no need for experimentation.

dhw: I challenged the argument that experimentation denotes weakness. I don’t “want” him to do anything. I offer experimentation as just one hypothesis to explain why he might have designed all those millions of non-human life forms. I shan’t list my various alternative hypotheses, the logic of which you have repeatedly acknowledged. Your authoritative statement above (he knows exactly what he wants) fits in perfectly with the hypothesis that what he wanted was an autonomous mechanism to produce the higgledy-piggledy bush of comings and goings, with millions of different life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders – totally unrelated to humans - that constitute the wondrously colourful and unpredictable history of life. That also allows for the odd dabble if he felt like it.

Same old retreat to your humanized view of God. In your view God allows an 'unpredictable' course of evolution. My God is supremely purposeful. He knows exactly what He wants to have happen.

NB I accept the history – all these beings evolved. But even if I were to accept your fixed belief that your God’s only purpose was to create H.sapiens, I would argue (one of my logical hypotheses) that all the different hominins and homos suggest experimentation, as opposed to a God who knew exactly what he wanted and was in total control. And there is nothing “weak” or “confused” about knowing what you want and experimenting in order to get it.

DAVID: A God who has to experiment is obviously weak.

dhw: If you think that your first cause God is “weak” because he doesn’t know in advance every single detail of something that has never existed before, then so be it.

DAVID: That is not what I wrote. You want Him to use experimentation. My God knows exactly what He wants and has no need for experimentation.

I challenged the argument that experimentation denotes weakness. I don’t “want” him to do anything. I offer experimentation as just one hypothesis to explain why he might have designed all those millions of non-human life forms. I shan’t list my various alternative hypotheses, the logic of which you have repeatedly acknowledged. Your authoritative statement above (he knows exactly what he wants) fits in perfectly with the hypothesis that what he wanted was an autonomous mechanism to produce the higgledy-piggledy bush of comings and goings, with millions of different life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders – totally unrelated to humans - that constitute the wondrously colourful and unpredictable history of life. That also allows for the odd dabble if he felt like it.

dhw: Usual problem: please explain why a God who specially designs whatever he wants to specially design might have found it necessary to specially design all kinds of hominins and homos before specially designing the only homo he wanted. You have admitted in the past that you have “no idea”, but perhaps you have now worked out an answer.
NB I accept the history – all these beings evolved. But even if I were to accept your fixed belief that your God’s only purpose was to create H.sapiens, I would argue (one of my logical hypotheses) that all the different hominins and homos suggest experimentation, as opposed to a God who knew exactly what he wanted and was in total control. And there is nothing “weak” or “confused” about knowing what you want and experimenting in order to get it.

DAVID: A God who has to experiment is obviously weak.

dhw: If you think that your first cause God is “weak” because he doesn’t know in advance every single detail of something that has never existed before, then so be it.

That is not what I wrote. You want Him to use experimentation. My God knows exactly what He wants and has no need for experimentation.

DAVID: A God who has to experiment is obviously weak.

If you think that your first cause God is “weak” because he doesn’t know in advance every single detail of something that has never existed before, then so be it. I would prefer the logical concept of a God who teaches himself new tricks than a God who knows exactly what he wants (humans), is in full control, and yet “has to” design the weaverbird’s nest (times many millions of other examples extant and extinct) in order to design the one thing he wants to design.

Your misleading claim that ID folks support your theory is dealt with under “Unanswered questions”.

DAVID: The Neanderthals made major contribution to the evolution of sapiens with all the ancient interbreeding. Following dhw's strange thinking about God and humans evolution, why did He create all these homo forms if all He wanted was humans? One finding previously presented is that Neanderthal DNA provided broader immunity. I'm sure more reasons will be found. God acts purposefully.

dhw: Usual problem: please explain why a God who specially designs whatever he wants to specially design might have found it necessary to specially design all kinds of hominins and homos before specially designing the only homo he wanted. You have admitted in the past that you have “no idea”, but perhaps you have now worked out an answer.

NB I accept the history – all these beings evolved. But even if I were to accept your fixed belief that your God’s only purpose was to create H.sapiens, I would argue (one of my logical hypotheses) that all the different hominins and homos suggest experimentation, as opposed to a God who knew exactly what he wanted and was in total control. And there is nothing “weak” or “confused” about knowing what you want and experimenting in order to get it.

A God who has to experiment is obviously weak.

DAVID (Under "Evolution"): There is great difficulty in staying with the Linnaeus classification based only only body appearance:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/phyla-and-other-flawed-taxonomic-categories-vex-biologis...

QUOTE: "Scientists can usually sidestep the problems with taxonomic rankings by separating discussions about how organisms evolved from arguments about how to name or classify them. “When you’re doing evolution, you’re doing evolution. And when you’re doing systematics and taxonomy, that’s a different thing,” he said. That separation may be awkward, but “it’s clunky because life is clunky.'”

DAVID: I still feel this is the wrong approach. Use genetic comparisons as previously proposed. God made a complex bush obviously to purposely to create the necessary econiches for a food supply to finally reach primates and then humans over 3.8 billion years. God chose the entirety of the evolutionary process of creation.

dhw: Nobody has yet found a satisfactory system of classification. As the author points out, that has nothing to do with HOW organisms evolved. Back we go again:The idea that your God designed every single life form so they could all eat or not eat one another until he designed the only thing he wanted to design is a theory for which apparently you have not yet found any support from the scientific world, and I wonder what the theological and philosophical world would make of it.

My ID folks support my theory. They demand that a designer created evolution. They just don't label the designer as God.

Usual problem: please explain why a God who specially designs whatever he wants to specially design might have found it necessary to specially design all kinds of hominins and homos before specially designing the only homo he wanted. You have admitted in the past that you have “no idea”, but perhaps you have now worked out an answer.

NB I accept the history – all these beings evolved. But even if I were to accept your fixed belief that your God’s only purpose was to create H.sapiens, I would argue (one of my logical hypotheses) that all the different hominins and homos suggest experimentation, as opposed to a God who knew exactly what he wanted and was in total control. And there is nothing “weak” or “confused” about knowing what you want and experimenting in order to get it.

DAVID (Under "Evolution"): There is great difficulty in staying with the Linnaeus classification based only only body appearance:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/phyla-and-other-flawed-taxonomic-categories-vex-biologis...

QUOTE: "Scientists can usually sidestep the problems with taxonomic rankings by separating discussions about how organisms evolved from arguments about how to name or classify them. “When you’re doing evolution, you’re doing evolution. And when you’re doing systematics and taxonomy, that’s a different thing,” he said. That separation may be awkward, but “it’s clunky because life is clunky.'”

DAVID: I still feel this is the wrong approach. Use genetic comparisons as previously proposed. God made a complex bush obviously to purposely to create the necessary econiches for a food supply to finally reach primates and then humans over 3.8 billion years. God chose the entirety of the evolutionary process of creation.

Nobody has yet found a satisfactory system of classification. As the author points out, that has nothing to do with HOW organisms evolved. Back we go again:The idea that your God designed every single life form so they could all eat or not eat one another until he designed the only thing he wanted to design is a theory for which apparently you have not yet found any support from the scientific world, and I wonder what the theological and philosophical world would make of it.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2207681-neanderthals-from-europe-may-have-ousted-t...

"The study reveals a remarkable continuity of European Neanderthal ancestry and a migration to the east which seems to have ousted their Siberian relatives. It also shows that some European Neanderthals hold clues about other ancient hominins in their DNA, as a result of interbreeding.

"Neanderthals first arose around 430,000 years ago, living in Europe and central Asia until their demise some 40,000 years ago. Few details are known about their population history, not least because the DNA in their ancient bones is hard to analyse due to degradation and contamination by microbes and from people who handled their remains.

***

"The researchers compared these DNA profiles with genetic profiles of two Neanderthals who lived in the Denisova cave in Siberia 90,000 and 120,000 years ago. They also looked at Neanderthal DNA from individuals who lived in Europe about 40,000 years ago.

“'It’s the first time we can look at Neanderthals in Europe across a long period of time,” says Peyrégne. “It’s very exciting because we don’t know about the early history of Neanderthals. We can start asking questions about the relationships of the different Neanderthals that occupied Europe. ”

"Importantly, the team managed to obtain gene sequences from DNA found in the nucleus of cells of the Neanderthal bones. This reveals far more detailed information about ancestry than DNA from mitochondria of cells, which only tells us about the maternal lineage.

"The team found that the 90,000-year-old Neanderthal from the Denisova cave was more closely related to that of 120,000-year-old European Neanderthals than to the individual who had lived in the same cave 30,000 years previously. This suggests that the European population migrated eastwards and replaced the Neanderthals already living there.

"The researchers also found that the Neanderthals living in Europe around 40,000 years ago were closely related to those who had lived there 80,000 years previously, suggesting long-term stability of this population.

“The continuity of the Neanderthal lineage in Europe suggests that Europe was the core area of Neanderthals, from which they repeatedly dispersed to the east, possibly in reaction to climatic cycles,” says Katerina Harvati at the University of Tübingen, Germany, who was not involved in this study.

"But things weren’t always so straightforward for the European Neanderthal ancestry. Peyrégne’s study also found that the mitochondrial genome of the Hohlenstein-Stadel Neanderthal was from a different lineage to that found in all other known Neanderthal genomes, as a result of breeding with a genetically distant hominin.

"This confirms an earlier genetic analysis of the Hohlenstein-Stadel Neanderthal, which proposed that this mitochondrial genome originated when Neanderthals mated more than 219,000 years ago with an early human who had migrated from Africa. However, the new analysis by Peyrégne’s team suggests an alternative origin: that this unexpected maternal lineage could be the result of interbreeding with a long-isolated Neanderthal population we have yet to detect.

“'It is possible that there was this isolated Neanderthal population that we haven’t discovered yet, that could have contributed the mitochondrial genome to the Hohlenstein-Stadel Neanderthal,” says Peyrégne.” Europe was heavily glaciated between 130,000 and 190,000 years ago and it is possible that some populations became isolated during this time, he says."

Comment: The Neanderthals made major contribution to the evolution of sapiens with all the ancient interbreeding. Following dhw's strange thinking about God and humans evolution, why did He create all these homo forms if all He wanted was humans? One finding previously presented is that Neanderthal DNA provided broader immunity. I'm sure more reasons will be found. God acts purposefully.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24232283-700-major-discovery-suggests-denisovans...

"THE first fossil of our cousins the Denisovans ever to be discovered outside Siberia has been identified in Tibet. It hints that fossils from these extinct humans are more widespread than we thought, and may help settle a long-running debate about our origins.

***

"He and his colleagues examined a jawbone discovered in 1980 in Baishiya Karst cave, in Tibet’s Jiangla river valley. They found that the shape of the jaw and large size of the teeth are different to those of modern humans.

"Radioisotope dating suggested that the fossil is 160,000 years old at least, which is tens of thousands of years before our own species is thought to have reached the Tibetan Plateau.

"No DNA could be extracted from the fossil, but analysing collagen protein in its teeth confirmed the jawbone came from a Denisovan, because modern humans and our other extinct cousins the Neanderthals have different genes for collagen

"The finding could explain the 30,000-year-old stone tools discovered in Tibet last year. It is mind-blowing that hominins could have been living in such an extreme environment, says Hublin. “Even today, Tibet is not an easy place to live. There aren’t many resources and there’s a lack of oxygen.”

***

"Hublin says several previously discovered fossils from sites in China have features that don’t match those of modern humans or Homo erectus, another ancient hominin which is, like the Denisovans and Neanderthals, thought to have left Africa long before we did.
“I predict that most of the Chinese hominin fossil record younger than 350,000 years and older than 50,000 is made of Denisovans,” says Hublin.

“'We probably have lots of Denisovan remains sitting in museums all over the world, but they have different names on them,” says Cox.

"If Hublin is right, these fossils could help settle the debate over whether our ancestors evolved solely in Africa, or whether important steps took place in Asia too. Previous discoveries of fossils in China have been interpreted by some as intermediate species between H. erectus and modern humans, suggesting that we evolved in eastern Asia. But this idea will lose ground if the fossils turn out to be Denisovan.

"However, Sheela Athreya at Texas A&M University says that linking such fossils to Denisovans would be putting the cart before the horse. We know so little about the Denisovans’ physical characteristics and where and when they lived, she says. “We don’t know what ‘Denisovan’ is.'”

Comment: There is lots more we need to learn about this group of early homos. It must be recognized that the fossils we study are not in large enough numbers to get a clear picture of our evolution.

I also do not think that there is enough solid evidence to make a theory about the origin of the species. Particularly in light of recent findings in genetic studies.

It is a problematic finding because of our current understanding of early >fossils, such as the famous Toumai specimen uncovered in Chad.

Toumai (Sahelanthropus tchadensis) was thought to be right at the foot of the human family tree. It dates to between 6.5 and 7.4 million years ago. In other words, it is older than the point of human-chimp divergence seen in the genetic data.

One of the other problems is that our predecessors fooled around with other branches of hominids:

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-10-genes-neanderthal-relatives-unusual.html