EarthSky: Twenty years of discoveries changing story of human evolution

EarthSky has an interesting article that summarizes twenty years of human evolution discoveries.  They write:

Perspectives on our own species have also changed. Archaeologists previously thought Homo sapiens evolved in Africa around 200,000 years ago, but the story has become more complicated. Fossils discovered in Morocco have pushed that date back to 300,000 years ago, consistent with ancient DNA evidence. This raises doubts that our species emerged in any single place.

This century has also brought unexpected discoveries from Europe and Asia. From enigmatic “hobbits” on the Indonesian island of Flores to the Denisovans in Siberia, our ancestors may have encountered a variety of other hominins when they spread out of Africa. Just this year, researchers reported a new species from the Philippines.

All of these discoveries point to the idea that there was considerable population mixing throughout the Middle to Late Pleistocene not just in Africa but throughout the Old World. We know that it took place in China around 120,000 years ago by the evidence from Linjing.  These particular hominins have characteristics found in modern humans, Neandertals and Homo erectus.

Interestingly, the idea that our species did not originate in any single place was an idea pursued by Rachel Caspari almost two decades ago, at a paper given at one of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists conventions.  At the time, it was still thought that the “Out of Africa” replacement model was still the best explanation for modern human origins.We now know that it is not.

Denisovans More Closely Related to Modern Humans than Neandertals

Science Daily has a post relating recent research on the genetic studies involving the Denisovan material from Siberia.  The research, done by CNRS in France has this to report:

Now a team of scientists from the Institut Jacques Monod (CNRS / Université de Paris) has measured and photographed another fragment found in Denisova Cave. Genomic analysis reveals it is the missing piece of the same phalanx whose proximal fragment enabled initial sequencing of the Denisovan genome.

Together with colleagues from the PACEA laboratory (CNRS / University of Bordeaux / French Ministry of Culture) and the University of Toronto (Canada), the scientists compared the new fragment to the phalanges of Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. Their analysis indicates it is very close to the latter, and less like the former..

This research suggests that there was considerable population mixing and genetic variability in this population, given the news that came out last year detailing the finding of a child skeleton that was, as nearly as the researchers could tell, the offspring of a Neandertal and a modern human.This just continues to solidify the idea that these groups interbred routinely throughout the late Pleistocene.