Newly discovered species of humans in Siberia

Archeologists publishing in the journal Nature, have discovered the 40,000 year-old pinky bone of what appears to be a new species of human--in Siberia. (Actually, it's southern Siberia, but it's still SIBERIA). A DNA analysis revels that the, uh, owner--was neither directly related to humans or neanderthals of the era, but more likely a distinct offshoot of humans. From USAToday:

Analysis of the pinky bone discovered in a dirt layer about 40,000 years old yielded enough DNA for the gene study. It shows the creature's ancestry diverged from humans and Neanderthals roughly 1 million years ago. Dubbed "x-woman" by the researchers, despite its undetermined gender, the pinky owner may have belonged to an archaic human species such as Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis, known only from fossils, or an unknown pre-human species. From the size of the pinky tip, the team estimates its owner was a 5- or 6-year-old child.

Check out the full article or the article at Nature.com. Sharp readers will note that the image found at USAToday is a bit misleading as the pinky belonged to a child and the image is of an already known hominid.

Previously: Hobbits Discovered!

Hobbits Discovered!

No, not the cute, cuddly, furry-footed, Elijah Wood variety. This kind:

...and that's supposedly a female. Well an artist's conception anyway. Scary, huh? I'm not sure that's even the "hobbit" they found, but it's definitely post-worthy material. It's those eyes (shudders).

Anyway, you've probably heard about this already from a few years back. But that one wasn't the real deal. This time, scientists are confident about their findings of a race of 'little people'.

FTA on MSNBC:

In an astonishing discovery that could rewrite the history of human evolution, scientists say they have found the skeleton of a new human species, a dwarf, marooned for eons in a tropical Lost World while modern humans rapidly colonized the rest of the planet.

The finding on a remote Indonesian island has stunned anthropologists like no other in recent memory. It is a fundamentally new creature that bears more of a resemblance to fictional, barefooted hobbits than modern humans.

Yet biologically speaking, it may have been closely related to us and perhaps even shared its caves with our ancestors.

Read more...

Nat Geo has more as well...

Discover Magazine has even more...