Thanks Darksheare.
The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a very different story. It most closely resembles DNA from an enigmatic lineage of humans known as Denisovans. Until now, Denisovans were known only from DNA retrieved from 80,000-year-old remains in Siberia, 4,000 miles east of where the new DNA was found.Gosh, it's almost as if each of us loses half of the genetic information found in our parents, just as they lost half of their parents', etc. And best of all, that means that we don't get the same amount from each of our grandparents, and this process works for each previous and subsequent generation -- basically, we have 46 family trees which follow back along each half of each chromosome. By the time we reach those 64 4th-great-grandparents, at least 18 of them have passed down nothing at all.
