Denisovans: Who were these ancestors of the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens?

By Catholic Online (NEWS CONSORTIUM)
8/31/2012
Catholic Online (www.catholic.org)

Early species of humankind shared same genetic makeup

Denisovans, an entire race of primitive man has been reconstructed from a single finger bone and two teeth. These examples of prehistoric humans share the same genetic makeup as the Neanderthals and modern man, and yet scientists are at a loss to who they exactly were.

The slim case for the Denisovans existence, the bones of a single finger and two teeth, were found in a cave in southern Siberia, give some preliminary clues.

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LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The slim case for their existence, the finger and two teeth, were found in a cave in southern Siberia, and give some preliminary clues.

Sequencing the Denisovan genome, scientists have arrived at a quality that is about as high as the genome of a person alive today. Modern scientists today can learn about as much genetically about a person who lived tens of thousands of years ago as they can about a living person. Recent findings have delivered a wealth of insight about ancient people who once roamed the Earth.

Lead researcher Svante Paabo, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, says that by comparing the genetics of modern humans with relatives in the evolutionary tree, it appears there are more than 100,000 genetic mutations that most people alive today share. There are still many that our closest relatives in the evolutionary line did not have, he says.

"This is essentially a 'genetic recipe' " for being a modern human, Paabo said in an e-mail. "Scientists can now start working on understanding how we differed from Denisovans and Neanderthals."

Although some of the Denisovans' remains were found in southern Siberia, their genetic signature is not present anywhere apart from islands in the Pacific. About three percent to five percent of the DNA of people from Melanesia (islands in the southwest Pacific Ocean), Australia and New Guinea as well as aboriginal people from the Philippines are from the Denisovans.

These isolated areas are the only places where Denisovan DNA has been found, Paabo says. By process of elimination, the Denisovans must have been in Southeast Asia at one time.

Everyone who lives outside Africa today probably has some Neanderthal DNA in them, Paabo says.

Scientists aren't sure how old the finger bone used for the DNA sequence really is. Archaeologists date it to 30,000 to 50,000 years old. Biologists who conducted this study believe it could be 80,000 years old, belonging to a juvenile female. She may have had dark skin, brown hair and brown eyes, based on genetic associations.

It also appears that the Denisovans mixed with (and mated with) indigenous people in Papua New Guinea and Australia, Paabo said.

"They probably became extinct about the same time as Neanderthals when modern humans spread around the world," Paabo said.

� 2012, Catholic Online. Distributed by NEWS CONSORTIUM.

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General Intention: The Faith of Christians. That in this Year of Faith Christians may deepen their knowledge of the mystery of Christ and witness joyfully to the gift of faith in him.
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Keywords: DEnisovans, Neanderthals, modern man, genomes, DNA, research teams, primitive man

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1 - 5 of 5 Comments

DarthJ
8 months ago
True, Barbara. Most people fail to see that the greatest boon to racism is evolution, because it gives the racists "scientific" reason to shun their fellow man. Only 6 day Creation holds all in high esteem, be they Oriental, African, Polynesian, or Caucasian.
Evolutionists are greatly limited in their hypothesis. For instance, a soul could not have been imbued in a brute, for the Fourth Lateran Council ruled that God, "who by His own omnipotent power at once from the beginning of time created each creature from nothing, spiritual, and corporal, namely, angelic and mundane, and finally the human, constituted as it were, alike of the spirit and the body.”
Note that God created both the spiritual and corporeal at the same time. This would mean that the first human (Adam) was given a soul at the moment of his Creation, and rules out any evolutionist sub-human given a soul well into his life. Vatican Council I also stated that "[God] immediately from the beginning of time fashioned each creature out of nothing, spiritual and corporeal, namely, angelic and mundane; and then the human creation, common as it were, composed of both spirit and body.”
Note that the Council makes the distinction again of both being created at the same time and immediately. As the soul was created immediately, so also was the first human out of nothing. The Vatican Council continues, "If anyone does not confess that the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, as regards their whole substance, have been produced by God from nothing, let him be anathema."
Though not having definitive power, the Council of Cologne summed up the Church's Tradition, stating, ""Our first parents were formed immediately by God. Therefore we declare that...those who...assert...man...emerged from spontaneous continuous change of imperfect nature to the more perfect, is clearly opposed to Sacred Scripture and to the Faith."
Barbara Logan
8 months ago
DarthJ has it! Evolution is a theory not a fact - interesting but also very harmful, ask the Aboriginal people of Tasmania. Oops, not possible, they're all dead, hunted like animals because that is what Darwin's evolutionary ideas deemed them to be. As a student in Johannesburg several decades ago, there was an exhibit at the main railway station showing various humanoid skulls. The European skulls were the pinnacle with negroid skulls following and then the various ape-man skulls. Ergo - apartheid!
Mary Minnet
8 months ago
I believe Catholics are not required to believe in a 24 hour - 6 day time line for creation of the universe, earth and mankind. However, we are required to believe: that God created the world for the glory of God, of His own free will, that creation is ordered to goodness and that God creates out of nothing (ex nihilo) meaning that there was a beginning (CCC, 292-299).

Good sources to study the connection between faith and reason are the Magis Institute, Catholic Answers and the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Jed
8 months ago
DarthJ, why don't you read what Popes St. Pius X, Bls. John Paul II, and Benedict XVI wrote about evolution and the soul....unless, of course, mythical Jewish cosmology is a substitute for modern science. Ex Nihilo is a dogmatic belief that God created all things "out of nothing", and science can help us to discover the means which God used to progress materiality after it's creation!
DarthJ
8 months ago
It continually amazes me how Catholic sites toss around numbers of "80,000 years," and discuss the characteristics of alleged "sub-humans." So much for the Traditional understanding of ex nihilo, 6-day creation.

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