A fourth Denisovan individual
Viviane Slon1,*, Bence Viola2,3,4, Gabriel Renaud1, Marie-Theres Gansauge1, Stefano Benazzi3,5, Susanna Sawyer1, Jean-Jacques Hublin3, Michael V. Shunkov4,6, Anatoly P. Derevianko4,7, Janet Kelso1, Kay Prüfer1, Matthias Meyer1 and Svante Pääbo1
1Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany.
2Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, M5S 2S2 Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
3Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany.
4Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Siberian Branch, Novosibirsk RU-630090, Russia.
5Department of Cultural Heritage, University of Bologna, 48121 Ravenna, Italy.
6Novosibirsk National Research State University, Novosibirsk RU-630090, Russia.
7Altai State University, Barnaul RU-656049, Russia.
↵*Corresponding author. Email: viviane_slon@eva.mpg.de
Science Advances 07 Jul 2017:
Vol. 3, no. 7, e1700186
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1700186
Abstract
The presence of Neandertals in Europe and Western Eurasia before the arrival of anatomically modern humans is well supported by archaeological and paleontological data. In contrast, fossil evidence for Denisovans, a sister group of Neandertals recently identified on the basis of DNA sequences, is limited to three specimens, all of which originate from Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains (Siberia, Russia). We report the retrieval of DNA from a deciduous lower second molar (Denisova 2), discovered in a deep stratigraphic layer in Denisova Cave, and show that this tooth comes from a female Denisovan individual. On the basis of the number of “missing substitutions” in the mitochondrial DNA determined from the specimen, we find that Denisova 2 is substantially older than two of the other Denisovans, reinforcing the view that Denisovans were likely to have been present in the vicinity of Denisova Cave over an extended time period. We show that the level of nuclear DNA sequence diversity found among Denisovans is within the lower range of that of present-day human populations.
Copyright © 2017 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC).
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use , distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited.
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