Ancient DNA suggests new hominid line

ScienceNews ^ | Apr 24, 2010 | Bruce Bower

[decimon]

A new member of the human evolutionary family has been proposed for the first time based on an ancient genetic sequence, not fossil bones. Even more surprising, this novel and still mysterious hominid, if confirmed, would have lived near Stone Age Neandertals and Homo sapiens.

“It was a shock to find DNA from a new type of ancestor that has not been on our radar screens,” says geneticist Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. These enigmatic hominids left Africa in a previously unsuspected migration around 1 million years ago, a team led by Pääbo and Max Planck graduate student Johannes Krause reports in a paper published online March 24 in Nature.

The researchers base their claim on DNA from a finger bone belonging to a hominid that lived in the Altai Mountains of central Asia between about 48,000 and 30,000 years ago.

Anthropologists have generally assumed that hominids left Africa in a few discrete waves, starting with Homo erectus about 1.9 million years ago. Neandertal ancestors left between 500,000 and 300,000 years ago, followed by humans around 50,000 years ago.

But the new genetic sequence supports a scenario in which many African hominid lineages trekked to Asia and Europe in the wake of H. erectus, Pääbo suggests.

[John-Irish]

Would this explain the origin of Liberals?

[OldNavyVet]

From “Darwin’s Ghost” by Steve Jones; page 284

“A hunt for similarity through the dozen and more DNA sequences now known in all their detail, and the hundreds for which long segments have been worked out, reveals the very framework of existence. About a thousand genes are shared by every organism, however simple or complicated. Although their common ancestor must have lived more than a billion years ago, their shared structure can still be glimpsed. “

[Captain Steve]

Maybe the most important statement in the article is, ““That number of differences is good evidence for a new hominid because simple variation can’t account for it,” remarks geneticist Morten Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen.”

Again, “simple variation can’t account for it.” That statement is real science.

The more we know about DNA, mutation, variation and the fossil record, the more at a loss we are to explain the origin of mankind. For those who begin with the conclusion that there is no God, they have no other choice than to make things up, be it alien origins or this evidentially unknown “new member of the human evolutionary family.”

[WorldviewDad]

So true about those who begin with the conclusion that there is no God. I have heard it stated this way...”let’s start out by agreeing that there is no number four, now answer the question...2 + 2 = ?”

By excluding the answer before asking the question all that is left is to make things up as they go.

[x_plus_one]

bttt

[SunkenCiv]

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