Ancient remains found in Indonesia belong to a vanished human lineage
A woman buried 7,200 years ago in what is now Indonesia belonged to a previously unknown human lineage that doesn't exist anymore, a new genetic analysis reveals.
The ancient woman's genome also revealed that she is a distant relative of present-day Aboriginal Australians and Melanesians, or the Indigenous people on the islands of New Guinea and the western Pacific whose ancestors were the first humans to reach Oceania, the researchers found.
Like the Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans, the woman had a significant proportion of DNA from an archaic human species known as the Denisovans, the researchers found. That's in sharp contrast with other ancient hunter-gatherers from Southeast Asia, such as in Laos and Malaysia, who do not have much Denisovan ancestry, said study co-leader Cosimo Posth, a professor at the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen in Germany. Read more.
