The history books talk about the development of the human species in a straight line sort of way. According to the old history books, human diversity didn’t exist thousands of years ago. The Neanderthals were the precursors to modern humans, according to some researchers. Neanderthals mated with other Neanderthals and scientists developed theories of human evolution based on Neanderthal discoveries through the years.
But those theories don’t hold water now that scientists found the remains of a Neanderthal woman in a limestone cave in Siberia. According to DNA analysis of the 90,000-year-old bone fragments, the women’s mother was a Neanderthal, but her father was from another branch of humanity called the Denisovans.
Scientists didn’t know about the Denisovans until 2010. That’s when they discovered bone fragments of a human in Denisova that didn’t match the DNA of the Neanderthals. Denisova is a cave in Siberia, and it contains bone fragments from a group of humans that lived at the same time as the Neanderthals. The Denisovans linage is different from modern humans, but scientists still don’t know what these humans looked like or what they did 90,000 years ago. But scientists know they were different from the Neanderthals and modern humans.
The thought that Neanderthals shared their lives with another group of humans isn’t new news. Many scientists believe a more advanced group of humans existed and flourished while the Neanderthals were living in caves and hunting with primitive weapons. Those modern humans also lived in caves with some Neanderthals. It appears human diversity did exist hundreds of thousands of years ago. And that diversity produced offspring’s that developed a more acute awareness of their surroundings, according to some scientists.
What scientists know is human evolution is more complicated than they thought. Some researchers say several species of humans interbred thousands of years ago while other species didn’t. Humans or human-like species existed on Earth long before the history books say they did. Some scientists think humans that lived millions of years ago were more sophisticated than humans today but finding proof of their existence a monumental task.
New research shows some people living in Australia and Southeast Asia have Denisovan genes. More discoveries like the Siberian cave discoveries are waiting to reveal more information about the real history of human evolution, according to a team of human researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
