PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF GEORGIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM
This skull's features resemble those of both earlier and later humans.
The human family tree suddenly sprouted some funky-looking shoots after a year of ancient DNA and fossil discoveries.
At the Dmanisi site in the Republic of Georgia, for example, researchers reported that what seemed like a lot of different-looking early human species likely were just one, Homo erectus. They based the claim on the discovery of a 1.8-million-year-old skull blessed with a mixture of more ancient and more recent characteristics. (See "Beautiful Skull Spurs Debate on Human History.")
On the genetic front, what looked like a Neanderthal bone in a Spanish cave turned out to actually possess the genes—the oldest DNA yet sequenced—of a different vanished early human species, the Denisovans.
Meanwhile, Siberia's Denisova cave, where Denisovan fossils were first discovered in 2008, yielded a toe bone that belonged to a Neanderthal woman from perhaps 140,000 years ago. (See "Ancient Incest Uncovered in Neanderthal Genome.")
This finding suggests that archaic humans mated with Homo erectus, as well as with some early modern humans in prehistory. A lot of modern people have a little archaic human in their genes, it turns out.
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