At a press conference yesterday, researchers announced the completely unexpected: a Siberian cave has yielded evidence of an entirely unknown human relative that appears to have shared Asia with both modern humans and Neanderthals less than 50,000 years ago.
The find comes courtesy of a single bone from individual's hand. Lest you think that paleontologists are overinterpreting a tiny fragment, it wasn't the shape of the bone that indicates the presence of a new species—it was the DNA that it contained.
The paper that describes the finding comes courtesy of the Max Planck Institute's Svante Pääbo, who has been actively pursuing the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome. It seems likely that this particular bone fragment was targeted due to suspicions that it might also provide an additional Neanderthal sequence.
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