The teeth of a 130,000-year-old girl confirm the existence of an ancient "cousin" of man!

A study published yesterday said that the teeth of a 130,000-year-old baby girl could help scientists reveal more information about an early cousin of humans.

The researchers believe this discovery proves that Denisovans, a now-extinct branch of humanity, lived in the warm tropics of Southeast Asia.

Very little is known about the Denisovans, a cousin of the Neanderthals.

Scientists first discovered its fossils while working in a Siberian cave in 2010 and found the finger bone of a girl belonging to a previously unidentified human group.

Using only a finger and a wisdom tooth found in Denisova Cave, they extracted a complete genome from the collection.

The researchers then found a jawbone in 2019 on the Tibetan plateau, proving that part of this species also lives in China.

Aside from these rare fossils, the Denisovans left few traces before disappearing, with the exception of the genes of today's human DNA.

Through interbreeding with Homo sapiens, Denisovan remains can be found in current populations in Southeast Asia and Oceania, and in Australian aborigines.

The scientists concluded that "the ancestors of these modern populations" mixed "with the Denisovans of Southeast Asia," said Clement Zanulli, an anthropologist and one of the authors of the study published Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications.

"There was no physical evidence of their presence in this part of the Asian continent far from the frozen mountains of Siberia or Tibet," a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research told AFP.

This was the case until a group of scientists began researching Cobra Cave in the northeastern state of Laos in Southeast Asia.

Zanoli explained that the tooth immediately appeared to take on a "typical human" shape.

The study said, based on ancient proteins, that the tooth belonged to a child, likely to be female, aged between 3.5 and 8.5 years.

But Fabrice Demeter, a paleontologist and co-author of the study, said the tooth is too old to be dated with carbon, and the DNA has been poorly preserved due to heat and humidity.

After analyzing the shape of the tooth, the scientists believe it was most likely a Denisovan who lived between 164,000 and 131,000 years ago. They then studied the interior of the tooth through various methods including proteomics analysis and 3D X-ray reconstruction.

The internal structure of the tooth was similar to that of the molars found in the Tibetan Denisova specimen, and was clearly distinguishable from modern humans and other ancient species that lived in Indonesia and the Philippines.

"The proteins allowed us to determine the sex - the female - and confirm its relationship to the human species," says Demeter, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, where the tooth is temporarily located.

The tooth structure had features in common with Neanderthals, who were genetically close to Denisovans, and the two species are believed to have diverged about 350,000 years ago.

But Zannulli explained that researchers concluded it was a Denisova specimen because no traces of Neanderthals were found until the Far East.

For Demeter, the finding shows that Denisovans occupied this part of Asia and adapted to a wide range of environments, from cold elevations to tropical climates, while their Neanderthal cousins ​​seemed more "specialised" in the cold western regions.

So it was possible that the last Denisovans met and interbred with modern humans, who passed their genetic heritage to the modern populations of Southeast Asia, in the Pleistocene era.

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