400,000 year old genome from spain sequenced

So they are blaming autoimmune diseases on breeding with these early sister human types. Why would only about 4-6% of humans have this gene still today? They have evidence we bred with them but I don't buy this being the reason for autoimmune yet. A good working theory worth watching though.

Text"The vast majority of autoimmune diseases have been shown by genome-wide association studies to be associated with particular HLA alleles and we find a couple of those in Denisovans," Norman added. "So it looks to me like modern humans have acquired these alleles, but we weren't kind of prepared for them, we hadn't grown up with them, and in some circumstances, they can start to attack us as well as the viruses and other pathogens."

www.theguardian.com...

undo
help i'm having problems understanding the op.
can someone explain the whole thing to me, slowly. i dunno why but every time i read it, it doesn't translate to anything understandable.

first, could someone post the list of which one is first second and so on, down the evolutinary chain to homo sapiens. then explain what makes the op so interesting please

From what I'm seeing we have both of these cousins of the human race (Neanderthals and these older ones). Did they come from chimps or gorillas - debatable but probably. We bred with both of them. That means we were around when both of them were around because we have a minimum of 4% of both of their DNA. So we were breeding with these guys and they were inbreeding. Then we became us and went off to different parts of the world (Africa, etc). If I'm wrong someone can correct those parts that are off.

Its a bit of a game changer and its going to take a few weeks for people to get their head around the idea. At the very least, it is going to create far more questions than answers.

slip2break
Its a bit of a game changer and its going to take a few weeks for people to get their head around the idea. At the very least, it is going to create far more questions than answers.

edit on 5-12-2013 by slip2break because: (no reason given)

i sense that you mean it has rather large socio-political implications and i would greatly appreciate any answer as to why this is an issue? is it involving racism or religious beliefs that arose from the prior findings and if so, what were the prior findings, how did they impact the socio-political climate, and how do the new findings put a crimp in the old ones?

reply to post by Dianec


how do we become us if we were already us, according to their findings? in effect we were around when we shared dna with the other 2 groups. isn't that what they are saying? that homo sapiens is much much much older than they originally thought and that we were therefore, walking around at the same time as neanderthal's and denisovians?

undo
reply to post by Dianec

 

how do we become us if we were already us, according to their findings? in effect we were around when we shared dna with the other 2 groups. isn't that what they are saying? that homo sapiens is much much much older than they originally thought and that we were therefore, walking around at the same time as neanderthal's and denisovians?

The misconception is that this pushed back the date of when anatomically modern humans came to be "us". That date hasn't changed and is still attributed to approx 100,000 BCE. AMH as well as Neandertal and H. Densiova are all of the genus Homo and therefore all humans. What this find does is show that Densiovan genetics were not confined to East Asia and they had a much broader range. All 3 members of the genus homo have a common ancestor, most likely H. Rudolphensis and while AMH was contemporary with the other 2 at one point that point was not contemporary with the femur mentioned in this article. There are sites however in the Levantine Valley of northern Israel and Lebanon where AMH and Neanderthal lived side by side at the same sites so there may have been instances in other areas that this happened with Denisovans as well. We're not sure what Denisovan morphology looked like as prior to this femur all we had to work with consisted of some toes. It could turn out that some remains currently classified as Neanderthal are actually Denisovan once we start taking more genetic samples. There has never been any question of contemporaneous overlaps between AMH and Neanderthal so adding Denisovans into the same mix isn't that much of a game changer.

reply to post by peter vlar


Hi peter,

One thing I would like to add is that the divergence of AMH has been pushed back to approx. 330,000 ybp, and HSD divergence to more than a milion years.
And there is still the two yet undiscovered homonins, one from Asia and one from Africa, that have contributed genes to denisovans and sub Saharan africans.
Dr. Dziebel has made an assertion that mechanism of modern human evolution is in fact a de-racialisation of the genus homo. There is more genetic variablity between two HSD indiduals within the same population, than there is in the whole modern human race .

undo
help i'm having problems understanding the op.
can someone explain the whole thing to me, slowly. i dunno why but every time i read it, it doesn't translate to anything understandable.

first, could someone post the list of which one is first second and so on, down the evolutinary chain to homo sapiens. then explain what makes the op so interesting please

Every living creature has DNA - DeoxyriboNucleic Acid, the helix spiral shape formed from long chains of base pairs of amino acids (guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine), known as G, A, T C for short) These in turn are arranged into genes and chromosomes. Billions of these form the genome of any one critter. But over every generation, small changes or mutations occur in the DNA of each individual. Over time (dozens of generations), successful or advantageous changes propagate through the population, while disadvantageous ones die out. Maybe it's heat or cold tolerance, better hearing, sight or communication, forward planning, ability to digest milk, meat, grain or fish.

But because of the social nature of humans, many genes or groups of genes remain exclusive to humans living in particular regions. Then these can be used to identify where an individual came from. Then the researchers put such groups of genes into "haplotypes". When the genome is visualized through chromatographic methods, it forms a barcode pattern, with individuals that are more closely related having similar patterns.

snp.cshl.org...

Now it is possible to compare the DNA of one human with an entire population, through the genetic differences. Then it becomes possible to identify the relationship with different groups of humans; is one descended from the other, did they have a common ancestor, or are they completely separate. This allows us to determine migration pattern of human civilisation across the world, all the way from Siberia to across the USA and down into the Far East.

www.scirp.org...
But the further back in time they go, the human population becomes smaller, and fewer skeletons are found, and it is practically impossible to recover DNA, until now. The researchers have been able to retrieve DNA from an individual who has been dead for 400,000 years.

undo
help i'm having problems understanding the op.
can someone explain the whole thing to me, slowly. i dunno why but every time i read it, it doesn't translate to anything understandable.

first, could someone post the list of which one is first second and so on, down the evolutinary chain to homo sapiens. then explain what makes the op so interesting please

Every living creature has DNA - DeoxyriboNucleic Acid, the helix spiral shape formed from long chains of base pairs of amino acids (guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine), known as G, A, T C for short) These in turn are arranged into genes and chromosomes. Billions of these form the genome of any one critter. But over every generation, small changes or mutations occur in the DNA of each individual. Over time (dozens of generations), successful or advantageous changes propagate through the population, while disadvantageous ones die out. Maybe it's heat or cold tolerance, better hearing, sight or communication, forward planning, ability to digest milk, meat, grain or fish.

But because of the social nature of humans, many genes or groups of genes remain exclusive to humans living in particular regions. Then these can be used to identify where an individual came from. Then the researchers put such groups of genes into "haplotypes". When the genome is visualized through chromatographic methods, it forms a barcode pattern, with individuals that are more closely related having similar patterns.

snp.cshl.org...

Now it is possible to compare the DNA of one human with an entire population, through the genetic differences. Then it becomes possible to identify the relationship with different groups of humans; is one descended from the other, did they have a common ancestor, or are they completely separate. This allows us to determine migration pattern of human civilisation across the world, all the way from Siberia to across the USA and down into the Far East.

www.scirp.org...
But the further back in time they go, the human population becomes smaller, and fewer skeletons are found, and it is practically impossible to recover DNA, until now. The researchers have been able to retrieve DNA from an individual who has been dead for 400,000 years.

punkinworks10
Dr. Dziebel has made an assertion that mechanism of modern human evolution is in fact a de-racialisation of the genus homo. There is more genetic variablity between two HSD indiduals within the same population, than there is in the whole modern human race .

And to me, this is the really cool part. I also think it lends additional credence to the Toba bottleneck hypothesis by demonstrating such a degree of diversity at that stage as there should be a higher degree now if there were not a genetic bottleneck 70,000 bpe excellent info as always.

reply to post by stormcell


thanks for the information! i was aware of the data on dna (pre-med student). the issue i was having was trying to figure out why the op's article was viewed as controversial

This isn't significant because it pushes dates impacting Homo Sapien Sapien further into the past, though it could have an significant impact on our understanding of homo sapiens development, it IS significant because it changes the timeline, as we understood it, for Neanderthal and Devisovan.

We're now going to have to explain two major inconsistencies that arise due to this finding. The first, is where neanderthal evolved. As Sima appears to have inhabited south Europe prior to Neanderthal, and has been found to be closer to the Denisovan find in Siberia than it is to Neanderthal, there appears to be an implication that Neanderthal did not develop where we had believed it to develop. Prior to this it was believed that bones discovered from this region was a group that were on their way to developing into Neanderthal.

Which brings up the second issue.... the prior belief about the bones being a pre-neanderthal stemmed from the morphological traits they shared with Neanderthal. Finding out they would better be classed as a pre-Devisovan when they are not morphologically similar to Devisovan is highly unusual. I like the explanation of convergent evolution-- where Neanderthal and Devisovan independently developed these traits-- that I have heard tossed about. But it usually isn't as simple explanation such as this that win out in the end.

I said it was game changing because I believe it changes the way we approach the topic entirely. Everything was neat and tidy in its own little box, Neanderthal over there, homo sapien sapien down there, Devisovan over there. But now we have bones in one box, that thought they physically looked as if they were pre-Neanderthal turn out to be pre-Devisovan looked deep in Neanderthal's little box, where they were supposedly developing in isolation.

I have just read Hong Hawks' blog on this work and he raises some very interesting points.

I direct your attention to a new paper by Mattias Meyer and colleagues describing a mitochondrial DNA sequence from Sima de los Huesos, Spain (Meyer et al. 2013). It is super awesomely cool work, and I can't wait for the further development as they attempt to get more DNA sequence data from the Sima sample. The recovery of cave bear DNA earlier this year from Sima presaged the current paper, and it seems we are now in a time where we can expect more results from Middle Pleistocene human remains. Very, very good.
Still, there seems to be a widespread confusion about the current result, which shows the Sima mtDNA sequence to be on the same clade as the mtDNA sequences from Denisova, Russia.

And

I sort of understand the confusion.
For more than a hundred years, scientists have been drawing straight lines connecting different fossils, to try to understand the human family tree. Those straight lines always diverged over time, leading toward increasing specialization and extinction of fossil groups. And for more than twenty-five years, geneticists have been assuming that the lines connecting the genealogy of mtDNA should be the same as the lines connecting the fossils. When those lines were different, geneticists have been happy to toss the fossils out of the human family tree, content to accept the story that the fossil people had become too specialized, too peripheral to be ancestors of today's
people.
johnhawks.net...

The last couple of paragraphs really have a lot to say.

To be sure, many people have been assuming that the Denisovans were some kind of East Asian population, for example in China or Southeast Asia. In the process, they have projected the characteristics of the Asian fossil record upon them. That idea has been supported by the existence of Neandertals to the west, and also the sharing of some Denisovan similarity in the genomes of living Australians and Melanesians.
But that's a big assumption. Let's explore an alternative: that the Denisovans we know are in part descendants of an earlier stratum of the western Eurasian population. Although they are on the same mtDNA clade, the difference between Sima and Denisova sequences is about as large as the difference between Neandertal and living human sequences. It would not be fair to say that Denisova and Sima represent a single population, any more than that Neandertals and living people do. But they could share a heritage within the Middle Pleistocene of western Eurasia, deriving their mtDNA from this earlier population.
We know that the Denisovan nuclear genome is much closer to Neandertals than the Denisovan mtDNA. We are still waiting for the long-rumored publication of the idea that Denisovan genomes have a "mystery hominin" element in their ancestry. They could be a mixture of any number of earlier populations. None of these have to be East Asian, and as yet we have no suggestion that this "earlier" element of Denisovan ancestry could be as ancient as the first known habitation of Eurasia, as much as 1.8 million years ago. Maybe the Sima hominins represent this "mystery hominin" population.
Maybe the Denisovans were west Asian Neandertals. It does seem like known genetics of Neandertals may represent something like an earlier iteration of the origin of modern humans -- more African than earlier hominins like the Sima sample, less influenced by Eurasian mixture than the Denisova genome, only a subset of the diversity of surrounding contemporaries. But we have no idea what the Neandertals of the Levant or southwest Asia may have been like genetically -- maybe they were more like Denisovans. This is all basically speculation, which indicates how little we still understand about the dynamics of these populations.
They were complicated. Their relationships cannot be described by drawing straight lines between fossil samples. There were multiple lines of influence among them, small degrees of mixture and large-scale migrations. Europe was far from a slowly evolving population "accreting" Neandertal features over time. The Neandertals we know did not lumber into their doom; they expanded rapidly, multiple times, from non-European origins. They were as dynamic as the Middle Stone Age Africans who would later mix with them and expand across the world.
So I don't find the Sima mtDNA to be the least bit surprising. It's refreshing

It's a very very interesting turn of events, this new information ask more questions, than it answers.

I havnt kept up with the finds in Spain, at various locations such as
Gran Dolina.
The human family tree is looking more like a bush

reply to post by punkinworks10


Hawkes is the man, he's got a way of making the most intricate concepts understandable to the point my 11 year old checks out his site pretty frequently. I was reading through this earlier and thought this part was also rather interesting-

But that's a big assumption. Let's explore an alternative: that the Denisovans we know are in part descendants of an earlier stratum of the western Eurasian population. Although they are on the same mtDNA clade, the difference between Sima and Denisova sequences is about as large as the difference between Neandertal and living human sequences. It would not be fair to say that Denisova and Sima represent a single population, any more than that Neandertals and living people do. But they could share a heritage within the Middle Pleistocene of western Eurasia, deriving their mtDNA from this earlier population. We know that the Denisovan nuclear genome is much closer to Neandertals than the Denisovan mtDNA. We are still waiting for the long-rumored publication of the idea that Denisovan genomes have a "mystery hominin" element in their ancestry. They could be a mixture of any number of earlier populations. None of these have to be East Asian, and as yet we have no suggestion that this "earlier" element of Denisovan ancestry could be as ancient as the first known habitation of Eurasia, as much as 1.8 million years ago. Maybe the Sima hominins represent this "mystery hominin" population.

Now we just have to impatiently wait for everything to be published properly.

undo
reply to post by Dianec

 

how do we become us if we were already us, according to their findings? in effect we were around when we shared dna with the other 2 groups. isn't that what they are saying? that homo sapiens is much much much older than they originally thought and that we were therefore, walking around at the same time as neanderthal's and denisovians?

Yes but we bred with them so it changed us. I don't know what we were like before that but it caused a change. It made us survive more readily because it increased our immune response greatly for that period of time. Haven't read the peer review on this but that's my take. Now that same protection then may be a hinderance today with the remaining 4-6% of the DNA we still carry from our earliest ancestors breeding with them. If they also found a homosapien at 800,000 years old I missed that. But it makes sense - we have their DNA so does that mean we were around? Or does it mean we evolved from all of that? I'm not sure.

reply to post by punkinworks10

This new discovery just brings to realization of how far we have come in understanding man's history, BUT continues to create so many more questions of just how we lived, migrated, interacted over 100,000's of thousdands of years.

Just a fascinating read for those interested, and how we continue to find new evidence of man, our interaction with Neanderthals and our traverse across the continents.

Hints at new hidden complexities in the human story came from a 400,000-year-old femur found in a cave in Spain called Sima de los Huesos (“the pit of bones” in Spanish). The scientific team used new methods to extract the ancient DNA from the fossil.

“This would not have been possible even a year ago,” said Juan Luis Arsuaga, a paleoanthropologist at Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a co-author of the paper.

Scientists have found the oldest DNA evidence yet of humans’ biological history. But instead of neatly clarifying human evolution, the finding is adding new mysteries.

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.

The mismatch between the anatomical and genetic evidence surprised the scientists, who are now rethinking human evolution over the past few hundred thousand years. It is possible, for example, that there are many extinct human populations that scientists have yet to discover. They might have interbred, swapping DNA. Scientists hope that further studies of extremely ancient human DNA will clarify the mystery.

One of the mysteries that has scientists interested and shaking their heads is the close DNA mapping of the Denisovans located in Siberia indicating that they had lived there about 41,000 years ago, but only in that area of Siberia,

found in the remote Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia, a cave which has also been inhabited by Neanderthals and modern humans.

One of the fascinating observations was

The mismatch between the anatomical and genetic evidence surprised the scientists, who are now rethinking human evolution over the past few hundred thousand years. It is possible, for example, that there are many extinct human populations that scientists have yet to discover. They might have interbred, swapping DNA. Scientists hope that further studies of extremely ancient human DNA will clarify the mystery.

“Right now, we’ve basically generated a big question mark,” said Matthias Meyer, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany

It was just back in 1996 that Scientists excavating in the dusty Middle Awash region of Ethiopia have unearthed an amazingly complete skeleton of a new species of hominid -- an ancestor to modern man -- which they have named Ardipithecus ramidus, nicknamed "Ardi".

The find began in 1994 with the unearthing of a hominid hand. One and a half decades later, Ardi was revealed in her full form, a skeleton consisting of over 125 bone pieces. Among the most complete hominid skeletons found to date, Ardi is approximately 4.4 million years old, 1.2 million years older than the famous "Lucy" (Australopithecus afarensis) skeleton. Ardi is in fact the oldest hominid found to date.

List of Source Documentation:
Journal of Science
NY Times Science
National Geographic Daily News
Daily Tech Story of 'Ardi'


Just an exciting time in human history and trying to put the puzzle of man, it's beginning and how we got to where we are today together.......I have a feeling there is still a lot we just don't know and many more surprising finds that will shake current day paradigms. Enjoy!!

So the question is, should or should not this DNA be used to create the extinct species?

OccamsRazor04
So the question is, should or should not this DNA be used to create the extinct species?

Not sure, does it make difference if species is from homo family?

What I wondered as kid, if scientist get to the point that can create clone from DNA sample, should they clone DNA from mummies from Egypt? Would go well with their belief of eternal life... and just imagine if their soul finds their body.