The Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains is known for the discovery of a finger bone, from which DNA was sequenced and related to a previous unknown species, the Denisovans. Now in an older layer in the same cave researchers found a toe bone, at least 50,000 years old. The complete genome of this toe…
A team of researchers led by Maanasa Raghavan from the University of Copenhagen have reported in Nature on their sequencing of the oldest modern human genome to date. The sample comes from a 4-year old boy who was buried at the site of Mal’ta in south-central Siberia. It concerns an Upper Palaeolithic burial, ca. 24,000…
When, where and how anatomically modern humans originated and migrated remains a controversial topic. While fossil evidence seems to favour eastern Africa (e.g. Omo and Herto), archaeological evidence seems to indicate the origin of certain types of behaviour in southern Africa (e.g. Blombos). Genetic and palaeoclimatic evidence add additional levels of complexity. A recent study…
