An international team of scientists has identified a previously shadowy human group, known as the Denisovans, as cousins to Neanderthals who lived in Asia from roughly 400,000 to 50,000 years ago and interbred with the ancestors of today's inhabitants of New Guinea.
All the Denisovans left behind are a broken finger bone and a wisdom tooth in a Siberian cave. But the scientists have succeeded in extracting the entire genome of the Denisovans from these scant remains. An analysis of this ancient DNA, published Wednesday in Nature, reveals that the genomes of people from New Guinea contain 4.8 percent Denisovan DNA.
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