Evidence for God from Science

Scientists have reached farther back than ever into the ancestry of humans to recover and analyze DNA, using a bone found in Spain that's estimated to be 400,000 years old. So far, the achievement has provided more questions than answers about our ancient forerunners.

The feat surpasses the previous age record of about 100,000 years for genetic material recovered from members of the human evolutionary line. Older DNA has been mapped from animals.

Experts said the work shows that new techniques for working with ancient DNA may lead to more discoveries about human origins.

Results were presented online Wednesday in the journal Nature by Matthias Meyer and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, with co-authors in Spain and China.

They retrieved the DNA from a thighbone found in a cave in northern Spain. It is among thousands of fossils from at least 28 individuals to be recovered from a chamber called the "Pit of the Bones." The remains are typically classified as Homo heidelbergensis, but not everybody agrees.

The age of the bones has been hard to determine. A rough estimate from analyzing the DNA is around 400,000 years, which supports what Meyer said is the current view of the anthropologists excavating the site. Todd Disotell, an anthropology professor at New York University, said geological techniques suggest the remains are older than 300,000 years but it's not clear by how much. By comparison, modern humans arose only about 200,000 years ago.

The researchers mapped almost the complete collection of so-called mitochondrial DNA. While the DNA most people know about is found in the nucleus of a cell, mitochondrial DNA lies outside the nucleus. It is passed only from mother to child.

Kurieuo wrote:I came across this just last night too. Certainly interesting.

Also read an admission I think by one of the lead researchers that human evolution has become more messy, but then that's to be expected because lots of things in life are messy. Couldn't help but chuckle.

account27 wrote:

Kurieuo wrote:I came across this just last night too. Certainly interesting.

Also read an admission I think by one of the lead researchers that human evolution has become more messy, but then that's to be expected because lots of things in life are messy. Couldn't help but chuckle.

What exactly was the comment that human evolution has become more messy? Meaning how to track it, or the evolution moving forward?

Update for 10:30 p.m. ET Dec. 4: Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told NBC News that the DNA findings were interesting from a technical standpoint — but he pointed out that the mitochondrial DNA alone doesn't reveal how the Sima de los Huesos people and their ancestors lived. He suspects that further DNA studies will show that the relationships between populations of early humans were messier and more tangled than the typical diagrams of human origins would suggest. That's appropriate, he said, "because I think the real world is messy."

• Unusual finding
  Previous analysis of bones from the cave had led researchers to assume that the Sima de los Huesos people were closely related to Neanderthals on the basis of their skeletal features. But the mitochondrial DNA was far more similar to that of the Denisovans, an early human population that was thought to have split off from Neanderthals around 640,000 years ago. The first Denisovan specimens were identified in 2010, based on an analysis of 30,000-year-old bones excavated in Siberia.
  
  This skeleton from the Sima de los Huesos cave has been assigned to an early human species known as Homo heidelbergensis. However, researchers say the skeletal structure is similar to that of Neanderthals - so much so that some say the Sima de los Huesos people were actually Neanderthals rather than representatives of Homo heidelbergensis.
  
  The latest DNA analysis sent scientists scrambling for an explanation.
  
  "This unusual finding could be due to at least two different scenarios, both relating to the material inheritance of mtDNA [mitochondrial DNA] and the ease with which it can be lost in a lineage," Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at London's Natural History Museum who was not involved in the Nature study, wrote in an email.