DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum A new species of Human?

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This definitely is very exciting stuff. I wonder how long this species might have survived. The past was brutal and definitely nature calls for survival of the fittest. I wonder if neanderthals and these ones might have mated and assimilated into the human gene pool. This one's DNA might show that they're clearly different, but who knows, another find that isn't as old could present a prehistoric human remain that is intermingled.

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I always wish we could clone these species. May be artificially change it and make your own version, and they could mate.

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I think someone has a neanderthal fetish

Not joking, I swear Ive seen a few people that could be part neanderthal. If they dont have the gene, I guess its not possible. They have yet to find a living human with the gene but they have found babies/toddlers with both characteristics. Never a full grown human. The way things were back then, I think the chances are greater that one of the two species would have killed a young cross breed rather than letting it live.

What I find very interesting is the hobbit people they found on that island.

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In this latest study, the researchers compared 3-D, computer-generated reconstructions of nine microcephalic modern human brains and 10 normal modern human brains. They found that certain shape features completely separate the two groups and that Hobbit classifies with normal humans rather than microcephalic humans in these features. In other ways, however, Hobbit's brain is unique, which is consistent with its attribution to a new species.

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They still walk among us to this day.

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Are you inferring that they didn't prove anything? I mean, they just provided evidence that the skull internal morphology more closely resembles that of humans than the individual you just presented, suggesting a non-disabled state.

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The human family tree may be in for a dramatic rewrite. DNA collected from a fossilised finger bone from Siberia shows it belonged to a mysterious ancient hominid – perhaps a new species.

"X-woman", as the creature has been named, last shared an ancestor with humans and Neanderthals about 1 million years ago but is probably different from both species. She lived 30,000 to 50,000 years ago.

"This is the tip of the iceberg," says Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the find. More hominids that are neither Neanderthal nor human are likely to be discovered in coming years, particularly in central and eastern Asia, he says.

Roaming Asia

Previously, anthropologists thought that Neanderthals and humans were the only hominids roaming Europe and Asia during the late Pleistocene. The discovery of 17,000-year-old Homo floresiensis – the "hobbit" – dispelled that notion, but many anthropologists look on H. floresiensis as an anomaly, isolated from the human–Neanderthal hegemony on the mainland.

The newly discovered creature, which probably lived in close proximity to humans and Neanderthals, suggests that things were not that simple. "The picture that's going to emerge in the next years is a much more complex one," says Svante Pääbo, a palaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Pääbo and colleague Johannes Krause discovered the specimen in the Denisova cave in southern Siberia, and sequenced DNA from its mitochondria. It is impossible to say what the creature would have looked like based on a single pinkie bone, so Pääbo and Krause are hesitant to call it a new species.

Though the creature's sex is not known, they are for now referring to her as X-woman because mitochondria are inherited maternally. "No one really knows what she would look like," Pääbo says.

X-woman's mitochondria differ from a human's at nearly 400 DNA letters; Neanderthals show only half as many differences.

African ancestry

This suggests that X-woman shared an African ancestor with the two other species somewhere between 780,000 and 1.3 million years ago, before striking north and east. This expansion is distinct from the one that occurred around 500,000 years ago that gave rise to Neanderthals, and from our own species' peregrinations from about 50,000 years ago.

The split seems too recent for X-woman to be related to Homo erectus, which began moving out of Africa around 2 million years ago.

However, Clive Finlayson, a palaeoanthropologist at the Gibraltar Museum, says the idea that there were just a handful of hominid migrations out of Africa is a vast oversimplification that ignores how other species expand their range over time. "To talk about one or two expansions from a particular region doesn't make any biological sense," he says. "There were probably hundreds, thousands of migrations out of Africa."

Though there is no complete skeleton for X-woman, her lineage could mean she is related to any number of more complete specimens recovered in Asia that don't neatly fit human or Neanderthal body patterns, says Stringer. "This new DNA work provides an entirely new way of looking at the still poorly understood evolution of humans in central and eastern Asia."

Nuclear DNA

Pääbo and his team are hesitant to speculate too much about X-woman's nature until they obtain DNA sequences from the nuclear genome's 3.1 billion letters. That project is already under way, and the first results should come within months. Pääbo's team will likely want X-woman's genome to answer the same questions they are asking of the Neanderthal genome, which is due for publication soon.

For instance, humans and Neanderthals share unique mutations in a gene linked to speech and language called FOXP2. If X-woman's sequence is complete enough, they will be able to determine if it possesses the same change – and potentially the capability for language.

There is no sign in X-woman's mitochondrial genome that her kind interbred with humans or Neanderthals, but the nuclear genome will offer a far better chance of finding out.

Neanderthal neighbours

Given the close proximity of Neanderthal remains dated to the same time and artefacts that appear to be human, interbreeding is not unlikely, Pääbo says. "Having in about the same time window three different forms [of hominids], increases the potential of all types of interactions, including genetic."

X-woman's mitochondrial DNA begins to paint a picture of what she was like, if only a blurry one. The protein-coding genes do not contain any surprising mutations that would cause disease.

Finlayson would love to link X-woman to other bones, and even stone technologies, though the chances of doing this may be slim. "Ideally we would like to have all that information, but we don't. The fact that we've got this genetic result is important, it's very important."

Pääbo hopes that such a connection will come through sequencing DNA from other Asian hominid fossils. But he, too, is prepared for the possibility that such bones may never turn up.

He sees in X-woman the beginning of a new way of understanding human history. "It gives another picture of our past, a molecular picture of the evolution of our genome" which he says is in some aspects even more conclusive than fossils

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I wonder what religion has to say about these other species?

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I also wonder if its possible for DNA in evolve.

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I also wonder if its possible for DNA in evolve.

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Do you mean in a way that we would need to re-characterize it at an atomic level? Like if DNA changed into a different heritable trait carrier that was a new genetic recipe for an organism? Or do you mean for the code/sequence to mutate and cause variable inheritance based on survival over time?

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I meant both

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*sigh* you didn't get the second joke either.

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What species are you GM?

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I also wonder if its possible for DNA in evolve.

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Do you mean in a way that we would need to re-characterize it at an atomic level? Like if DNA changed into a different heritable trait carrier that was a new genetic recipe for an organism? Or do you mean for the code/sequence to mutate and cause variable inheritance based on survival over time?

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I meant both

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Most early life theories stem from a RNA world where the first life was RNA-based due to it's ability to copy itself easily but it wasn't very stable. DNA on the other hand is extremely stable, but hard to copy. A middle-ground was reached with DNA carrying the genetic makeup and RNA-derived proteins tending to the care and maintenance of DNA. If DNA changed in a structural way, the body would need complementary changes in not just proteins that read,copy, and modify DNA, but also regulation proteins that help silence or activate specific genes depending on their cell lineage and any incoming signals. It's a long shot in my opinion that we'll ever see a large amount of change from the current method of trait storage. But, anything is possible concerning the makeup of a living organism living under the pressure of natural selection.

As for the mutation causing variable inheritance over time idea, I'm pretty sure we have that one pegged as possible and happening daily.