South-East Asia reveals details of ancient relatives
species is a lonely one. Today there are two species of gorilla, two of chimpanzees and a whopping three species of orang-utan, but just one sort of human. It wasn’t always so. People are familiar with the idea that. In 2004 researchers announced to great fanfare that they had found the bones of a third contemporaneous relative, a rather short human species who lived on the Indonesian island of Flores. This became, and was quickly dubbed the “Hobbit”.
The islands of South-East Asia were also once home to the mysterious Denisovans. What little is known about them has more to do with laboratory work than digging in the ground for remains. That is because very few Denisovan fossils have been found. A finger bone, a skull fragment and a handful of teeth are the only physical testimonies to their existence. They are not enough to say what the Denisovans looked like, or to assign them a species name.
Murray Cox, a computational biologist at Massey University in New Zealand, and his colleagues pushed the analysis further by probing a new genetic database, containing modern genomes from the islands of South-East Asia, a region that is both densely populated and largely unrepresented in genetic surveys.
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