In a cave in Siberia, scientists have found a 40,000-year old pinky bone that could belong to an entirely new species of hominid. Or it may be yet another example of how hard it is to figure where one species stops and another begins--even when one of those species is our own. Big news, perhaps, or ambiguous news.
In Nature today, Svante Paabo and his colleagues published a paper describing their work in a place known as the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. There are lots of hominid bones and tools indicating people lived in the cave, off and on, for 125,000 years. There's good evidence of Homo sapiens in the region for at least 40,000 years, and Paabo and his colleagues have also isolated 30,000-year old DNA from Siberian sites that is similar to the DNA from Neanderthals in Europe.
The scientists succeeded in fishing out ...
