Publication Date:
2013-12-07
Description:
Excavations of a complex of caves in the Sierra de Atapuerca in northern Spain have unearthed hominin fossils that range in age from the early Pleistocene to the Holocene. One of these sites, the 'Sima de los Huesos' ('pit of bones'), has yielded the world's largest assemblage of Middle Pleistocene hominin fossils, consisting of at least 28 individuals dated to over 300,000 years ago. The skeletal remains share a number of morphological features with fossils classified as Homo heidelbergensis and also display distinct Neanderthal-derived traits. Here we determine an almost complete mitochondrial genome sequence of a hominin from Sima de los Huesos and show that it is closely related to the lineage leading to mitochondrial genomes of Denisovans, an eastern Eurasian sister group to Neanderthals. Our results pave the way for DNA research on hominins from the Middle Pleistocene.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Meyer, Matthias -- Fu, Qiaomei -- Aximu-Petri, Ayinuer -- Glocke, Isabelle -- Nickel, Birgit -- Arsuaga, Juan-Luis -- Martinez, Ignacio -- Gracia, Ana -- de Castro, Jose Maria Bermudez -- Carbonell, Eudald -- Paabo, Svante -- England -- Nature. 2014 Jan 16;505(7483):403-6. doi: 10.1038/nature12788. Epub 2013 Dec 4.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany. ; 1] Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany [2] Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100044, China. ; 1] Centro de Investigacion Sobre la Evolucion y Comportamiento Humanos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid-Instituto de Salud Carlos III, 28029 Madrid, Spain [2] Departamento de Paleontologia, Facultad de Ciencias Geologicas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain. ; 1] Centro de Investigacion Sobre la Evolucion y Comportamiento Humanos, Universidad Complutense de Madrid-Instituto de Salud Carlos III, 28029 Madrid, Spain [2] Area de Paleontologia, Depto. de Geografia y Geologia, Universidad de Alcala, Alcala de Henares, 28871 Madrid, Spain. ; Centro Nacional de Investigacion sobre la Evolucion Humana, Paseo Sierra de Atapuerca, 09002 Burgos, Spain. ; 1] Institut Catala de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolucio Social, C/Marcel.li Domingo s/n (Edifici W3), Campus Sescelades, 43007 Tarragona, Spain [2] Area de Prehistoria, Dept. d'Historia i Historia de l'Art, Univ. Rovira i Virgili, Fac. de Lletres, Av. Catalunya, 35, 43002 Tarragona, Spain.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24305051" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Animals
;
Bayes Theorem
;
Consensus Sequence/genetics
;
Cytosine/metabolism
;
DNA, Mitochondrial/genetics
;
Deamination
;
Femur/anatomy & histology/metabolism
;
*Fossils
;
Genome, Mitochondrial/*genetics
;
Hominidae/anatomy & histology/*classification/*genetics
;
Molecular Sequence Data
;
Neanderthals/genetics
;
*Phylogeny
;
Spain
Print ISSN:
0028-0836
Electronic ISSN:
1476-4687
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
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