take a bone from the dry sea: whose hand held it last?
So the Denisovans get more and more interesting.
A shortish Ars Technica piece leads off: a new, improved sequencing technique has allowed the Denisovan genome to be sequenced at up to 20x that of the Neandertal genome, making them our new best-known cousin.
And then John Hawks, whom I particularly trust as speaker-for-geneticists in this area, gives a more detailed analysis.
How did Asians end up lacking any evidence of Denisovan ancestry, when the peoples of Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) have six percent? [...] We must, I think, conclude that there was at least one, and possibly several episodes of massive population movement across South and Southeast Asia.
There's much more, including hints of FOXP2 differences: he writes clearly and well.
Human evolution, o fascinating field. So many peoples; what songs did they sing, what myths did they care for? For now, a single tooth is having to speak for all that they were.
A shortish Ars Technica piece leads off: a new, improved sequencing technique has allowed the Denisovan genome to be sequenced at up to 20x that of the Neandertal genome, making them our new best-known cousin.
And then John Hawks, whom I particularly trust as speaker-for-geneticists in this area, gives a more detailed analysis.
How did Asians end up lacking any evidence of Denisovan ancestry, when the peoples of Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) have six percent? [...] We must, I think, conclude that there was at least one, and possibly several episodes of massive population movement across South and Southeast Asia.
There's much more, including hints of FOXP2 differences: he writes clearly and well.
Human evolution, o fascinating field. So many peoples; what songs did they sing, what myths did they care for? For now, a single tooth is having to speak for all that they were.