Another hominin lineage that interbred with (some) modern human populations..(omar)

The human family tree has some additions to it: There is big news about the Denisova hominins....I will wait for Razib Khan and others to blog on it and post links to their (sure to be) interesting commentary. Until then, this is a good summary of what we know..

And here is Razib's initial comment, which includes links to many other comments..

And I have changed hominid to hominin to reflect current practice.

Comments

[twitter.com/razibkhan]

tx. the "correct" term today btw is "hominin." i forget why, has something to do with taxonomic clarity/precision. i just type wut they tell me ;0)

[prasad]

It's the physicist in me calling everything else stamp-collection, but I find the *history* of precisely how human populations evolved only somewhat more interesting than understanding how different types of elephants evolved. Who gives a f$#% what the taxonomy is? It had to be something, no? It's the "function" or lack thereof that seems to matter - if five percent of Melanasian genes are found in no other human populations, the details of that 5% (what if anything those genes do and so forth) seem interesting to me. But news stories tend to omit function and dwell on the trees. To me it's like watching explorers discover alien spacecraft, and then spending all their time telling square, purple spacecraft apart from red spiral ones, instead of understanding how the damn things work.