New Human Species Found

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OmegaFenix22

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Leipzig - A new species of human life has been discovered in Russia, thanks to DNA tests on a finger bone that was excavated in Siberia, scientists based in Germany said late on Wednesday.

The person, estimated to have lived 30 000 years ago, did not belong to the Homo sapiens species, the only form of human life today, but also wasn't a Neanderthal, a species that died out 35 000 years ago.

The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig made the discovery, which is reported in Thursday's issue of the science journal Nature.

The find suggests there was yet another emigration of hominid ancestors from Africa, where all Homo species have their ancestral roots. Previously it was thought that only Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Homo erectus managed that long-distance relocation.

The bone, which was found in 2008 in a cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, yielded enough mitochondrial DNA to be analysed by a team led by Johannes Krause and Svante Paabo.
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Source

So if Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Homo erectus did a long-distance relocation.... what stayed in Africa?
 
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A new species of human life has been discovered
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I don't know what source you got that from, but they are talking nonsense. The original article quite clearly says it is *not* a new species.
 
Did you guys read the comments from the posters on that site?
Here we thought Neanderthals were extinct. :rolleyes:

EDIT:
Here is an article as original as possible.
http://www.thelocal.de/sci-tech/20100325-26113.html

I am alsways a bit concerned when scientists make leaps of faith like this.
Piltdown man springs to mind.

Hmmmm...a new species? Interesting!
 
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From the original article in Nature

After obtaining the bone, the German team extracted the bone's genetic material and sequenced its mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) — the most abundant kind of DNA and the best bet for getting an undegraded sequence from ancient tissue.

After re-reading the mtDNA sequences an average of 156 times each to ensure accuracy, the researchers compared them with the mtDNA genomes of 54 modern humans, a 30,000-year-old modern human found in Russia and six Neanderthals. The Denisova Cave DNA fell into a class of its own. Although a Neanderthal mtDNA genome differs from that of Homo sapiens at 202 nucleotide positions on average, the Denisova Cave sample differed at an average of 385 positions.

The differences imply that the Siberian ancestor branched off from the human family tree a million years ago, well before the split between modern humans and Neanderthals. If so, the proposed species must have left Africa in a previously unknown migration, between that of Homo erectus 1.9 million years ago and that of the Neanderthal ancestor Homo heidelbergensis, 300,000 to 500,000 years ago.
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http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100324/full/464472a.html

There is no reason not to think that a number of the giant ape species didnt evolve, and that humans are simply the last of a particular branch and that the others such as Neanderthal man didnt survive due to habitat, breeding cycles and societal structuring.
 
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