Denisovans - 400,000 year-old clue to human origins

In this area of human history, 50,000 Kya keep popping up often. As we know from C's
  • 58KYA humans are thriving on the planet ( 3 races Kantekanians, Paranthas, Native Americans ) and had inter-planetary travel capability
  • 50KYA, there is a nuclear war between Kanteannians and Paranthas in India and destroyed 50% of the land.
  • 50KYA, Hindu God Rama is a high priest influenced by good guys fought with lizards(aka psychopathy).
  • Atlanteans created structures on Mars 50KYA.
  • As per Main stream sources, 50 KYA Denisovans moved to Australia.
Is this move related to nuclear war in India that destroyed 50% of its land? If it destroyed 50% of country , it has to be a pretty big attack and nuclear radiation must have spread all the surrounding area including South East Asia. It must have forced lot of people into some other places including large continent like Australia.

The forefathers of the aborigines reached Australia around 50,000 years ago, scattered around the continent's coasts for about 1,500 to 2,000 years and then, having settled down wherever they settled down, they didn't budge for the next 50,000 years, a genetic study published in Nature today indicates.

It seems that once they settled down, by and large, the aborigine groups did not mix. So while the aborigines may boast the most ancient civilization on earth, it isn't a consistent one. One upshot of their geographical consistency is that over the last 50,000 years, the different groups of aborigines grew extremely diverse, genetically, physically and in language and culture too, Prof. Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide told Haaretz.

Each group in its area would have wandered about a bit, as they were nomadic hunter-gatherers. But they evidently didn't wander far enough for the groups to meet and mix, Cooper says. (In fact it was the transition from a hunting-gathering lifestyle to modern western habits that is believed responsible for their sudden increase in obesity and heart disease – anecdotally, before the advent of westernization in Australia, the aborigines had been lean and fit.)

The Denisovan signal

The researchers analyzed mitochondrial DNA, which originates from the mother, taken from 111 hair samples collected across Australia from 1928 to the 1970s.

The analysis showed that like all known human populations today, the aboriginal Australians descended from the Homo sapiens group that left Africa about 60,000 years ago. A group of them crossed into Asia and from them, a single founding population arrived in Australia 50,000 years ago, back when Australia was still connected to New Guinea, says the team.

This group split, moving around the east and west coasts of Australia, says the team.

"Amazingly, it seems that from around this time the basic population patterns persisted for the next 50,000 years - showing that communities have remained in discrete geographical regions," Cooper stated, adding, "This is unlike people anywhere else in the world."

Probably true, though being sedentary is definitely not the exclusive fief of the original Australians. In 1997 one Adrian Targett, a history teacher in the English village of Cheddar, Somerset, learned that he is a direct matrilineal descendent of a 9,000-year old skeleton found in a cave right there. So there was another family that didn't get about much.

Getting back to the Australian aborigines, separate research has shown that they have roughly the same Neanderthal DNA component as non-Africans, which indicates they split off after at least the first interbreeding between the two species. (All populations tested so far except for Africans have tested positive for Neanderthal DNA, to some degree.)

In addition, previous research has shown that the aborigines, and population of New Guinea, have a very high proportion of Denisovan DNA. They have between 2% to 3%, well above the proportion found in other human populations.

The question is where they picked it up, Cooper points out – "Outside Australia, presumably, but it must have been close by, because the amount of Denisovan DNA that they have, 2% to 3%, suggests the hybridization was not that far back in time."

And that in turn supports the theory that the Denisovan hominin species was widely spread in Asia, though so far their remains have only been found in the Altai Mountains in Siberia, and very few remains at that.

The most logical place for the ancestors of the aborigines to have mixed with Denisovans is south east Asia, Cooper suggests. The traces of Denisovan genes found in the aborigines shows they're not the same Denisovans as were found in the Altai Mountains.

"Perhaps we're looking at two extremes of the Denisovans," Cooper speculates. "Or the or Denisovans could be more complex than we thought."

Or maybe that genetic signal is something else entirely. Earlier this month, speculation exploded about two hominin crania at least 105,000 years old that had been found in central China, which appear to have traits of homo sapiens, archaic hominins and Neanderthals. Some have speculated the beings were Denisovans. Others think the crania attest simply that the diversification of human species is something of an artifact, and they may have mixed more than assumed during the late Pleistocene era.

Adding to the mystery of our origin, a study done in India in 2016 to detect the migration of hominins in Asia through genetics concluded that the ancestors of Andaman islanders interbred with an unknown human species – not Neanderthal or Denisovan but something else.
No remains of it have been identified yet, though. The Andamans aren't exactly next door to Australia, so there's no reason to think this mystery man is also tied with the original aborigines. But the signs are multiplying that the history of man may be a lot naughtier than we had thought.
 
Is it Another Hit of C's - Ancient Indians as Denisovans or Paranthas


Denisovan.jpg

Nearly a decade ago, a snippet of pinky bone found in Siberia introduced the world to a baffling new kind of ancient human. Called Denisovans, after the name of the cave in the Altai Mountains where the bone was found, these ancient relatives of the Neanderthals inhabited Asia for tens of thousands of years—yet no fossil trace of them has been found save that finger bone, a few teeth, and a scrap of skull, all from Denisova cave.

A study published today in Cell adds a surprising new twist to their mystery: DNA from a large sampling of living southeast Asians suggests that the ghostly Denisovans may be not one, but three distinct kinds of human, one of which is almost as different from other Denisovans as they are from Neanderthals.

What's more, while the Denisovans lived alongside humans for millennia, one group may have outlasted even the Neanderthals, who disappeared some 40,000 years ago. According to the study, these Denisovans co-existed and mixed with modern humans in New Guinea until at least 30,000 years ago—but perhaps as recently as 15,000 years ago—a date that, if confirmed, means Denisovans were the last known humans save ourselves to walk the Earth.

The provocative find joins a number of recent discoveries that continue to point to a stunning diversity of hominins in ancient Asia, including the announcement just yesterday of a new species, Homo luzonensis, in the Philippines.

“Suddenly it’s kind of crystalized that the center of diversity for archaic populations is in Islands Southeast Asia,” says study co-author Murray Cox of Massey University, New Zealand, referring to the Philippines, Malaysia, and the other archipelagos that make up the vast maritime region of the Asian subcontinent.

Sharon Browning of the University of Washington expresses both excitement and caution about the results and what they might mean. In 2018, Browning and her colleagues identified two waves of Denisovan interbreeding with modern humans, which the new study expands upon.

“It’s just one little piece of the story,” she says of the new work. “But every little piece we find helps us really fill it out.”

Denisovan predecessors likely split from their Neanderthal relatives at least 400,000 years ago. And while the Neanderthals fanned out across Europe and the Middle East, Denisovans spread through Asia, eventually breeding with ancestors of modern humans of Asian descent. By doing so, Denisovans left their genetic fingerprints in Homo sapiens for generations to come—providing additional clues to learn about their kind.
...

Human health to heady history

Cox and his colleagues didn't initially set out to search for Denisovan diversity. Instead, the team was interested improving healthcare in Indonesia and neighboring regions in Island Southeast Asia. A better understanding of the gene variants related to disease in the region could lead to treatments targeted more specifically to those populations.

“It’s very important to us,” says study author Herawati Sudoyo, senior research fellow at Indonesia's Eijkman Institute, which partnered with an international team for this latest work. While Indonesia is a hugely diverse country that hosts many genetically distinct people, she notes that “there was no genetic study being done because…the technology was not [yet] here in Indonesia.”

Among the genetic differences distinguishing those diverse groups were ones with tell-tale signs that the splits between populations occurred deep in the past. Interbreeding between H. sapiens arriving from their African homeland and other ancient humans inserted tidbits of DNA from those archaic relatives that are passed from generation to generation to the present. Today, non-African populations have up to two percent Neanderthal DNA, some of which is beneficial and help human immune systems guard against infectious disease.

But Neanderthals weren't the only human relative with which H. sapiens interbred after they trekked out of Africa some 64,000 years ago. Most people of Asian descent carry some amount of Denisovan DNA, but it's particularly high in Melanesians, whose genomes are up to six percent Denisovan. It's thought that the ancestors of modern Melanesians met and mated with these ancients en route to their island home.

To dive deeper into this legacy, Cox and his team sequenced 161 genomes from 14 island groups across Indonesia and New Guinea. They combined this data with 317 genomes from around the world and compared all of the data to genomes from both Neanderthals and the Altai Denisovan. As they lined up the ancient Denisovan DNA with the Denisovan bits of modern Papuans, the team expected to see just a single spike, where modern Papuan DNA clustered. Instead, it split into two strikingly separate peaks.

“It was either the world’s most boring artifact or it was something that was going to be really, really cool,” Cox says.

Reading the genetic soup

According to the new study, the double spikes are indeed cool: They likely represent two distinct groups of Denisovans in New Guinea that are genetically quite different from the Denisovans from the Altai mountain cave.

One group, which interbred with modern humans who now live across Southeast Asia and India, split from the Altai Denisovans some 363,000 years ago—fewer than 50,000 years after the Neanderthals line likely split from their common ancestor.


“I’m fully on board with that,” says Bence Viola, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto and the leading expert on the little we know of Denisovan fossil morphology. He notes that as far back as 2010, when he and his colleagues first described the Denisovans, scientists noticed that the ancient hominin DNA in modern Melanesians was distinctly different than that extracted from the bone and tooth in Denisova cave. In 2014, he and his colleagues estimated these Denisovan populations split between 276,000 to 403,000 years ago, which brackets the newly proposed date.

But the true head-scratcher of this new study is the proposed third group of Denisovans that seem to have exclusively interbred with the ancestors of populations now in New Guinea, possibly mixing with them thousands of years after both Denisovans and Neanderthals were thought to have gone extinct.

This result is giving some scientists pause. For one, the study authors propose that this means Denisovans found a way to cross deep waters with strong currents—an obstacle scientists have long thought only modern humans with boats could navigate. But a number of finds in our century have challenged this notion: the short-statured Homo floresiensis of Indonesia, who inhabited Flores perhaps as far back as 700,000 years ago; the 118,000 to 194,000-year-old stone-tools on Indonesia's Sulawesi island; and most recently, the newly named 50,000 year old H. luzonensis, in the Philippines.

But whether this is true for Denisovans is still up for debate.

“The problem is simply that we don’t have any archaeological or fossil evidence for pre-modern humans in New Guinea or Australia,” says Viola. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, he says, but “there’s so much we don't know there.”

Evolutionary geneticist Benjamin Vernot, who developed some of the methods used in this latest analysis, has additional concerns about how the data was analyzed. While the team identified both large and small bits of Denisovan DNA in the modern genomes, they limited their analysis to only the longest DNA segments identified as Denisovan to ensure with the highest confidence that the identification was correct.

While Vernot agrees with this reasoning, he says “I’m always quite suspicious when a result that you have requires you to do some analysis, identify tens of thousands of things, and then take 500 of those and perform your analysis on that.”

Still, Vernot and other researchers are optimistic about what can be gleaned from the new genetic datasets now that others can download and pore over the alphabet soup. “This is how science works,” he says.

For their part, Cox, Sudoyo and their colleagues are currently working to understand how the bits of Denisovan DNA influence modern human health. While a lot more work is needed, they already have a few promising hints that some of the genes play central roles in the immune system and the metabolism of fat. And Cox is excited about what the future holds for Indonesian research.

“My hunch is that there’s a few more interesting stories to come out of this region.”
 
Indeed, it seems more like deliberate "creation of human types" than anything else. And it is so far back, even before the appearance of cro-magnon which we suspect to be the arrival of Kantekkians. And then, of course, there are the legendary Lemurians...
 
In my recent visit to Helsinki, some of the hotel personnel and restaurant workers lookel like very much like humanoid robots.

The whole experience was quite surreal.

The hotel is also a brand new type of hotel for digital nomads that is designed as a self sufficient "island" within all needed for guests' interactions. LIke a little planet within Helsinki.

It felt like I was walking through the open air museum of a new race of new humans.
 
An interesting article and study (very much based in standard evolutionary thought for the most part, though attempting to challenge a number of current assumptions) regarding the Homo naledi of South Africa around 300,000 years ago. May be of interest to some.

It focuses on an ongoing study into the Homo naledi of South Africa and what the studies' authors believe is their remarkably human-like practices:


  • Evidence suggests a complex 'ape-man' (Homo naledi) culture in southern Africa about 300,000 years ago (not considered to be directly related to modern humans).
  • They exhibit several behaviours similar to modern humans (envisage an afterlife, belief in an 'underworld', physically bury the dead in the 'underworld', give grave goods to the dead, carry out funerary meals, create rudimentary abstract art, plan a lighting system of torches/fires.
  • Their 'underworld' is located in Rising Star Cave in North-East South Africa, the main chamber being down 130m of tunnels (including 12m through passages 15-20cm wide and a 12m vertical chimney only 20cm wide).
  • The Homo naledi had brains barely bigger than a chimpanzee, but well-developed frontal lobes.
  • Suggests brain size is not the determining factor in intelligence…
  • Looks like the Homo naledi deliberately brought their dead deep into the caves
  • One dead child buried with a tool in her hand
  • Currently studying the hearths and food remains found in the caves; some bones may have been broken using tools
  • Also trying to prove the 'art' in the cave is the result of tool use, not natural erosion/weathering
  • Would have required great effort for these people to get into the cave, let alone bringing their dead in with them.
  • A few notes on how this 'very substantially blurs the cognitive boundary between our species… and our… ancestors and predecessors' and how this '…may shed fascinating new light on the ultimate origins of how and what modern humans still think and believe.' Shot across the bow there…
  • First time a species not closely related to humans may have been shown to use complex funerary behaviour.
  • Conclusions may affect our view of prehistory as Homo naledi was not a direct human ancestor, though there may be a common ancestor further back.
 
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