The ancient jawbone discovered in Taiwan belonged to a mysterious group of early human ancestors known as DenisovanScientists reported Thursday.
Relatively little is known about Denisovan, an extinct group of human cousins ​​who interacted with Neanderthals, our own species, and Homo sapiens.
“There are very few fossils of Denisovan,” said only a few discoveries in East Asia, Kingdom Tsutaya, co-author of the study at a graduate university for advanced research in Japan.
So far, only known denisova fossils include partial jawbone, several teeth and partial phalanx found in Siberian and Tibetan caves. Some scientists believe that the fossils in caves in Laos may belong to Denisovan.
Possible identification of jawbone from Taiwan as Denisovan is expanding the area where scientists know that these ancient people once lived, Tsutaya said.
“Therefore, Denisovan must be able to adapt to a wide range of habitat types,” Frid Welker, a co-author of the study, told Reuters.
Cheng-Han Sun/AP
Partial jawbone was first recovered when the fishery drove the seabed of Peng Channel near the Taiwan Strait. After being sold to an antique shop, the collector found it in 2008 and bought it, then donated it to the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Taiwan.
Based on the composition of the marine invertebrates attached to it, the fossils were dated during the Pleistocene era. But exactly which species of the early human ancestors belonged to remained a mystery.
The fossil state made it impossible to study ancient DNA. However, recently, scientists from Taiwan, Japan and Danish have been able to extract some protein sequences from incomplete jawbone.
Analysis showed that it resembles a protein sequence similar to that found in the fossil denigobus genome recovered in Siberia. The findings were published in Journal Science.
While the new research is promising, Rick Potts, director of the Human Origins project at the Smithsonian Association, said he would like to see more data before confirming Taiwanese fossils as Denisovan.
Potts, who was not involved in the new study, praised the study for “a great job of restoring some proteins.” But he added, a sliver of small materials like this may not give the big picture.
At least three human ancestor groups – Denisovan, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens – once coexisted with Eurasia. Sometimes I breedthe researcher says.
“You can wear the elements of Neanderthal and Denisovan,” Tsutaya said in the DNA of some people living today.
Scientists don’t know exactly why Denisovan was extinct.
“We can only speculate why they disappeared because there is so little archaeological and fossil information about Denisovan,” Welker told Reuters. “But the lasting legacy is that some of the people of East and Southeast Asia carry several Denisovan ancestors to today’s genome.”
