Questions Emerge about Evolutionary Links between European and Asian Forerunners to Humans

Scientists from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and other institutes have recovered the oldest known DNA from a member of the human evolutionary family. According to paleogeneticist Matthias Meyer, the DNA shows an unexpected hereditary link to the Denisovans, Neandertals' genetic cousins that lived in East Asia at least 44,000 years ago. The fossil bones were gathered from Sima de los Huesos which are from 28 individuals. Researchers identify these fossils as Homo heidelbergensis, a species thought to have been an ancestor of Neandertals and perhaps Homo sapiens as well.

"The Denisovan connection is fascinating, but I'm cautious about how to interpret it," said paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Because so many years and miles separate the Sima and Denisovan populations, it's hard to figure out the population movements and interactions that resulted in shared mitochondrial DNA segments, Hawks says. Meyer hypothesizes that the Sima hominids belonged to a population that was closely related to both Neandertals and Denisovans. If the Sima hominids' ancestors mated with members of another hominid species — possibly Homo erectus or an as-yet-undiscovered population —mitochondrial DNA variants could have entered the Sima DNA and later reached the Denisovans via interbreeding with the same species.

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