“Denisovtsy” lived in the Altai more than 100 thousand years, geneticists have found – RIA Novosti

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© Photo: David Reich et al., Nature

MOSCOW, September 16 – RIA Novosti. Mysterious “denisovtsy” neighbors Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, might first appear around the Denisova Cave in the Altai has 170 thousand years ago and lived in it for at least 65,000 years before their extinction, they said genetics, speaking at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Evolution in London.

In December 2010, Svante Paabo famous paleogenetics announced the opening of the “third” kind of people whose remains have been found in Russia’s Denisova cave in the Altai. This discovery was made thanks to the “resurrection” of the genome fragments, preserved in three fragments of bones of ancient people – metacarpophalangeal finger bones and two teeth found in the cave. As originally thought, scientists found they “denisovtsy” were cousins ​​the Neanderthals, who lived in a cave about 50 thousand years ago.

As said paleoanthropologist Vivian Elephant (Vivien Slon) of the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany) estimate of the lifetime denisovtsev is a very rough and inaccurate because of problems with dating, which experienced scientists in the study of the remains of animals, people and tools from the Denisova Cave. Estimates vary from very small numbers – about 30 thousand years for a number of bones of those layers where the remains were found “denisovtsev” and up to 170 thousand years, calculated using radioisotope methods.

Such discrepancies forced Paabo and his colleagues, including Academician Anatoly Derevianko and Michael Shunkova from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, calculate the age denisovtsev using genetic methods.

In this doctrine helped that recently the cave were found three denisovtsev tooth, two native and one deciduous molars, which contain a sufficiently large amount of DNA. When Paabo team regained the genomes of their owners – one woman and two men, she had the opportunity to calculate their age, based on the number of small mutations in each of the DNA samples.

As it turned out, Denisova cave was a refuge of the “third kind” of ancient people for a very long time, at least 65 thousand years. Interestingly, denisovtsy who lived in a cave at different times, not had each other relatives, as evidenced by marked differences in the structure of mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to child. This means, as suggested Paabo and his colleagues that the Denisova cave could be occupied by our “cousins” a few times over the past 100-170 thousand years.

Such a long existence “denisovtsev” allows, according to Pääbo, confidently say that we are dealing with is really a separate kind of people and not a subspecies of Neanderthal or late Homo erectus, who managed to somehow survive in Asia through hundreds of thousands of years after their extinction in Africa. In favor of this as well is the fact that genetically earliest denisovtsy, holders of two molars, were equally distant from the Neanderthals, as well as their later cousins.

On the other hand, the final status of denisovtsev as a separate type of people will be secured only when we find their remains more impressive than the teeth or small phalanx. According to anthropologists, some progress in this field has already been achieved – one of the participants of the conference reported that she managed to find fragments of human bones in one of the layers of sediments in the cave.