Posted on March 27, 2010 by by valerirojas

According to nature.com a team of russian researchers have found a sliver of human finger bone that may belong to a new human species that migrated out of Africa long before our known ancestors but could this be possible?

Author Rex Dalton – DNA analysis reveals lost relative from 40,000 years ago

In the summer of 2008, Russian researchers dug up a sliver of human finger bone from an isolated Siberian cave. The team stored it away for later testing, assuming that the nondescript fragment came from one of the Neanderthals who left a welter of tools in the cave between 30,000 and 48,000 years ago. Nothing about the bone shard seemed extraordinary.

Its genetic material told another story. When German researchers extracted and sequenced DNA from the fossil, they found that it did not match that of Neanderthals — or of modern humans, which were also living nearby at the time. The genetic data, published online in Nature¹, reveal that the bone may belong to a previously unrecognized, extinct human species that migrated out of Africa long before our known relatives.

“This really surpassed our hopes,” says Svante Pääbo, senior author on the international study and director of evolutionary genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “I almost could not believe it. It sounded too fantastic to be true.”

Researchers not involved in the findings cautioned against drawing too many conclusions from a single study. “With the data in hand, you cannot claim the discovery of a new species,” says Eske Willerslev, an evolutionary biologist and director of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen.

For the complete report on this story visit Fossil finger points to new human species.

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