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Other Humans by Brook Larmer. Stunning discoveries and fresh breakthroughs in DNA analysis are rewriting the evolutionary history of our species and offering in the picture of the mysterious other humans that our ancestors met as they fanned out across Europe and Asia. Deep inside Cobra Cave in the remote mountains of northeastern Laos, the beam from Eirak Suzoni's head lamp bounced across beer and rock until it flashed on something unusual, dozens of bones and teeth protruding from a

layer of sediment and rock. Suzoni, a tall, fifty year old heathing specialist with a tiger tattoo on his arm, galed out to his partner, Sebastian fran Dieu. This was the French explorer's first foray into Cobra Cave. They had just scaled sixty five feet of limestone cliff, ascending from the forest floor to the cave's entrance with their unlikely companions, a pair of local teenagers in foot clubs. The Long Boys knew the terrain around the cave and the name

Saint Cobras that sometimes lurked inside. To day, the snakes went nowhere to be seen, but soon after climbing into the cave, the explorers had stumbled upon what appeared to be a trove of ancient apostles. Suzoni and frong Dieu were scouting this cave for an international team of paleo anthropologists excavating sites nearby. For more than fifteen years, the scientists had been digging in these mountains, searching for clues

to some of the deepest mysteries of human evolution. When did Homo sapiens arrive here and what other humans did they enter? Suzoni didn't dare touch the uscis at first, but when he returned to survey the cave the next day with one of the research team's geologists, his task was to pry loose the sample of the sediment from the cave wall as he tapped on a chisel, A large brown tooth tumbled out, a molar that looked early human.

Suzoni hadn't intended to make a fine by protocol and profession, that was the scientist's job, but he marveled at the specimen for a moment and slipped it into his shirt pocket. It was, he says, a beautiful gift. Back at base camp, Suzoni huddled with the research team's leader, paleo anthropologist Fabrese Demder through the University of Copenhagen, and Namont de Zenotte, an expert in arcade teeth through the University of Bordeaux.

Suzoni carefully described what he'd seen up in Cobra Cave and showed them a few animal teeth he'd pulled from the sediment. Then he reached first pocket. Oh, I brought something for you, Sozoni's with a grin. Zanoli, wearing an Indiana Jones's hat, leaned in for a close look. The tooth was completely unworn, well preserved. He remembers, I knew immediately that it was human, but what kind of human? It was too big and rippled. He thought to have

come from a modern hopo. Some Homo sapiens, and though it superficially resembled a Neanderthal tooth, remains of that species had never been definitively identified. In East Asia, the scientists exchanged baffled books. Who was the owner of this mysterious tooth? A molar in Laos, a jawbone on the Tibetan Plateau,

the fragment of a pinky in Siberia. Our evolutionary history is now being rewritten by tiny discoveries, immuminated by past advancing science breakthroughs in active genetics, the study of proteins, and radioactive dating. The flood of new insights is not only radically changing the understanding of our origins, it is challenging the very notion of what it means to be. All of us, all eight billion people on this planet, belong to a single species. We Homo sapiens, are the

last prominens on her. Not long ago, it was widely believed that modern humans followed a relatively straight caff of evolutionary progress, as we found out of Africa, one that was separate from and implicitly superior to that of other species. Given today, one of the most indelible images of evolution is the so called March of progress, an illustration plastered on t shirts and posters that shows our predecessors improving their posture as they progress inexorably to Homo sapiens paul

and proud striding into the future. The current upheaval and evolutionary thinking has shattered that neat linear view of human origins and begun to replace it with a far more tangled picture. What researchers now know is that between seventy thousand and forty thousand years ago, a critical period in our evolution their development, the world teemed with human variety, and as Homo Sapiens radiated out across Europe and Asia, they countered and at times even mated with other types

of humans. Evidence of this commingling came in twenty ten when Swedish paleogeneticists Savante Paabo Bob napped the Neanderthal genome for the first time. His work proved that Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens pro created, and that the genetic exchange had profound in lasting consequences to day. More than forty thousand years after the Neanderthals went extinct, most human beings alive curing remnants of their DNA. But who else shared the

planet with us? And how did our interactions with these other humans shape the course of our own evolution and their extinction. Paleo Anthropologists are delving ever deeper into these questions, the same ones that Demeter and Zenoli faced as they studied the mysterious tooth from Probuncaid. One of the most revealing clues came from a cave in Siberia near Russia's bordered with Kazakhstan, where researchers uncovered a pinky fragment no

larger than a pea. The frigid temperatures in Denisovak kay had preserved ancient DNA in Deanderthal fossils discovered there, but this bone, more than sixty thousand years old, was different. When Pavo and his team analyzed its DNA, they came to a stunning realization. The fossil belonged to a completely unknown and banished human species. The Denisovans, as Pabo's team dubbed them, became the first human group ever identified solely through DNA, A ghost species, as at Spurts call those

without a physical identity. Denisovakave yielded more fossils with their DNA. These included a bone from a girl who had a Denisovan father and a Neanderthal mother, the only first generation hybrid kminin ever discovered from the finger fragment. Genusis were able to trace Denysovan DNA in modern day populations all over the world, from Iceland to Peru, with especially high concentrations in Papua New Guinea fifty five hundred miles away

from Denizova Cave. Homo sapiens almost certainly interbred with Denysovans as well as Neanderthals and carried their DNA across the planet. The paleo anthropologists now believed these gene flow events were not an anomaly, but a central feature of evolution, helping Homo sapiens adapt to new environments and leaving most of us with a direct biological length to extinct groups of

ancient humans. For all the advances in genetic and protein research understanding how Denysiban genes made it to Papua in the Guinea, or why Neanderthals and Denysovans after nearly half a million years of existence, disappeared, once Homo sapiens arrived will require more fragments of ancient bones and teeth. After more than a century of digging, the fossil record of our best known relative, Neanderthals is comparatively sparse, bones from

about four hundred individuals. The Denisovan record is vanishingly small. All of the Denisovan fossils ever found could fit into a bread box, and they would still be room for bagels. High on the Tibetan Plateau in China's Gansu Province, in a cave hollowed out of a cliff some eleven thousand feet above sea level, a Buddhist prayer site, has become a remarkable locus of scientific discovery. Long before the bones found their acquired modern value to modern researchers, they were

ground to make medicines and elixirs. Suits. Perhaps something of a miracle that an ancient jawbone found in Vaishia Karst Cave in nineteen eighty, now commonly known as the Shahi Mandible, still survives. The monk who discovered it brought the bone to its leader, the sixth Bungtang living Buddha, who bequeathed it to Chinese scientists. The mandible sat on a shell

for years unidentified and almost forgotten. But several years ago, inspired by the discoveries in Siberia, Lanchu University archeologist dong Ju Zhang joined some colleagues in trying to solve the riddle of the bone's identity. Then in her mid thirties, the bone had been languishing at the university for almost as long as she'd been alive. Zang initiated a delicate excavation in Vai Shia Karst Cave alongside the meditating monks,

but obstacles abounded. The jabon's muddled world history didn't specify exactly where in the cave it had been found. Even more confounding, the jabone had no trace of DNA. The only information came from the carbonate crust still clinging to it, which uranium thorium dating estimated to be at least one hundred sixty thousand years old. The jaw boone was by far the earliest trace of human presence ever discovered on the Tibetan planteau. Intriguing, yes, but it got Zong no

closer to identifying the fossil. On a work trip to Europe in mid twenty sixteen, Zong, either for help, met with a graduate student experimenting with a method of analysis that promised to go beyond DNA. Grido Velger was just twenty five, but he was already breaking new ground in the developing field paleo proteomics, which functions like a deep time machine. Its hustle haired. The Dutchman explained to Zong how he analyzed ancient proteins that persistent fossils far longer

than DNA, sometimes two million years longer. Proteins follow patterns set by a DNA, so they act like shadow of DNA, echoing information long after the origin was gone. Still, Velger warned Zong that extracting proteins is typically in asive. A whole must be drilled into the fossil, and there is no guarantee of success. I felt a huge responsibility for this precious artifact, Zong recalls, But we needed to find out what it was, and I was out of options.

Zong's last resource eventually became Welger's first big chance, what he calls a scientific opportunity for his nascent field. The protein material was extracted in China. Zong recalls how nervous she was handing over the mandible to be Drive and Belcher and now at the University of Copenhagen, then analyzed it with a mass spectrometer in the German lab. The patterns of the collagen protein found in the jawbone confirmed

that the fossil was in fact Denisovin. The revelation marked the first time an ancient human had been identified solely through proteins. The jaw moreover, was the first evidence of Denisovan's existing outside that of Denisova Cave, enriching the picture of a species about which nearly nothing was known. Y Thoris have continued in the story of the Dimissivans in

the Tibetan Planteau Cave has grown more detailed. A year after their discovery, Zong and her team found traces of Dimissovan DNA and Vaishia Karst cave, further confirming their presence there. Last summer of velter and as Chinese colleagues again used proteo proteomics and the dimisipan ribon to show that Dimisivans had inhabited the cave off and on for more than one hundred thousand years, butchering and consuming a wide range

of wild animals. Adding a piece of a puzzle is a unique experience, says Velper, because every new piece changes the arrangement of all the rest. Belcher's point about how one discovery can change the meaning of another is underscored by the jawbone that he and Zong revealed. Their work identifying the mandible meant that dinisivants now had an anchor point, a bone that would serve as a basis of compurison for other fossils would have found in a dusty Chinese collection,

or say, in a cave in Laos. This is precisely what Verbreece Demeter needed. He'd been carrying around the mysterious molar from Cobra Cave, trying to find ways to extract information from it. That no viable DNA could be found in the tooth. Not even plio proteomics could help, as the tooth's proteins were too limited for a conclusive reading. The only thing Demeter could determine was that the tooth was human and belonged one hundred and sixty millennia ago

to a young girl. But when he learned that Zong and Belger were set to publish a journal article unveiling the Demissian javo. Demeter knew Key and Zanoli, the tooth expert, could compare their molar with the two teeth on the javo. They discovered that one of the teeth was almost identical to the Cobra Cave molar. It was a morphological match, not in the disputable genetic one. But Demeter felt indicated maybe we had some luck me last year as his

team gathered at the Laos Cave site. But we've been digging here for twenty one years now our work is finally paying off. Cobra Cave marks the third place in the world where admissiban fossile has been found. It is also the first one discovered in a subtrop for gulp environment, about one thousand miles south of the high altitude Baishia Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau and two thousand miles southeast of the frigid Denisova Cave, suggesting that Dnissobam has

roamed widely and adapted to many different environments. As more dinisiban geographic markers are confined confirmed, and as their location and timeline continue to overlap with those of other comminins, in particular Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. More genetic puzzle pieces fall into place. In twenty fourteen, five years before the Jahi Mandibal was identified as Dimisipan, population geneticist Amelia where Sanche's at Brown University made a surprising discovery about the

ancient DNA. She found that the gene known as epas one, which helps Tibetans live comfortably at high altitude without getting hypoxia, came not from modern humans but from dinyicipans. Thinking from the Denizobev CAD gave her the only nearly perfect DNA match when Belcher and Zong confirmed that in nineteen twenty. In twenty nineteen that dinisibants had inhabited the Tibetan plateau, the connection made perfect. Set Tibetans put this gene to use.

Who at de Sanchez says, even though they carry only a small remnant of Dinisovant DNA and arrived on the plateau tens of thousands of years after the interbreeding took place. You don't need a lot of our DNA for it to be beneficial or useful. Later on, says the Reta Sanchez, who is now studying the dinisivant gene prevalent Indian Americas. Even a small amount, she says, has a huge impact

on people, as it did with Tibetans. The consequences of ancient ingebreeding are still poorly understood, but geneticists like where To Sanchez believe it serve a vital evolutionary purpose. That only did all that mating inject much heated genetic diversity into Homo sapianst populations, The gene flow gave modern humans evolutionary shortcuts to adapt more quickly to extreme environments, staving

off hypoxia inti PET for example. This bolstering of the immune system likely helped Homo Sapiens spread across the world, but the impact hasn't all been good, scientists finding that some of the genes inherited from Neanderthals and Dimicivans are associated with depression, autism, or obesity. Ingebrading. Moreover, didn't seem to help the Neanderthals and dimyicibans, though remnants of their

DNA live on within us. Their genomes show no trace of modern humans, and some scientists believe that interbreeding in the Homo Sapiens may even have hastened their demise. Ludovic Slimoch is obsessed with the moment when Homo sapiens might have pushed others human species out of the evolutionary picture.

The French paleo anthropologist with the University of Toulouse third has chased the ghosts of Neanderthals from the Horn of Africa to the Xerto for the past quarter century, and his wife, archaeologists Glorimetts, have spent much of their time digging and thinking in grout Mandarin, a paved in south in southern France, inhabited at different times more than forty two thousand years ago by Homo sapiens and some of

the last Neanderthals. It's just a small rock overhang, but the human story it tells is really universal, says Silmach. I use Neandertales as a mirror to try to see ourselves more clearly. Slimoch, bearded in the Barefoot, is halfway through an anime Lady Siloti on the Neanderthal extinction. When his seven year old son bursts into their twelfth century stone house in the foothills of the Pyrenees, Papa, look what I found. The boy drops a pile of bones

onto the kitchen table. Slimoc jumps up in delight to inspect the hall the bones of the remains of a deer, and father and son piece them together into a skeleton. Slimoch sees himself reflected in his son. All my life, I've been on a quest for our origins. Slimoch's pursuit has led him to study the period when Homo sapiens emerged from Africa, entering territory inhabited by Neanderthals, nizebants, and

other late hominins, the ghost species. This was a critical moment, the fifty two year old believes, when the last of these other pupmans were carrying out their own experiments in humanity, experienced that he strives to understand not just from a genetic perspective, but from a behavioral one too. Stirring around his office high in the raptors of his medieval home shows me stone flints found in brought Mandarin. When you take Neanderthal tools, each is unique, he says, pointing out

the variations in shape, color, and size. Living in small, isolated groups across Europe, Neanderthals displayed a creativity and a sensitivity to their environment, quite unlike early Homo sapiens, whose tools and weapons were almost identical from the levant to Western europe Neanderthals, Slimmoch says, perceived and engaged with the world in lays profoundly different from those of Homo Sapiens.

The discovery in brought Mandrin of one of the last Neanderthals in Europe, has prompted Slimok, a National geographic explorer, to think deeply about how the divergent natures of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals may have led to the latter's ultimate demise. The skeleton, which Slimoch named Thorin after the dwarf king in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, was found a decade ago. Slimoch's team has been slowly unearthed in it ever since, using tweezers to remove grains of sand and

fragments of bone. After nine years, they recovered parts of Thorign's skull, thirty one teeth, and a large number of tiny unidentified bones. The root of one tooth still had viable DNA, which yielded an astonishing insight. Just recently were unveiled. Thorn's group inhabited brout Mandarin about forty two thousand years ago and had been in genetic isolation for the previous fifty thousand years, never even mingling with other Neanderthals living

a few valleys away. For Slimov, this was further evidence of a deeper Neanderthal lineage and of how different Neanderthals were from modern humans. Slimov believes the moment when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens finally encountered one another was a turning point in evolutionary history and one captured on the walls

of brought Mandrian. His colleague, archaeologist Segunaine Vandeveld, analyzed the sub deposits left by cooking fires on the cave walls a kind, counting the rings on a tree, and found that the last fire in the part of the cave once inhabited by Neanderthals occurred less than a year before

the first Homo Sapiens fire. Whether there was an actual physical encounter or not, Slimok believes this moment around forty two thousand years ago marked the point of no return that the Neanderthals disappeared at the same time the wave of Homo Sapiens arrived, was not, in Slimok's words, an

unfortunate coincidence. Paleo Anthropologists have debated the cause of the Neanderthals extinction for years, and will surely do so with the Amisibans as their timeline and geographic spread become clearer. The Anisibans and Niagarthals seem to have vanished from the

fossil record at roughly the same time. There is a growing consensus among paleo anthropologists that the Neanderthals disappearance owed primarily to a demographic crisis, a dwindling population, limited genetic diversity exacerbated by climate change, and the emergence of a powerful rival, Homeward Sapiens. Inch A. Breeding may have played

a role too. Chris Stringer, a paleo anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London and National Geographic Explorer, suggests that Neanderthal females may have been absorbed or abducted by dominant Sapiens groups, pushing Neanderthals to the edge of the demographic abyss. The disappearance of the Neagarthals and Demizodines and other groups around forty thousand years ago marked the end of millions of years when multiple groups of Hammonen's walk theory.

The current epoch is a historical anomaly, and Stringer advises us not to be smug in our status as the last one's standing. Neanderthals and Dimizibans survived for half a million years, Homo erectus lasted nearly two million years. At the rate we're going, how successful hull we looked in two thousand years must be less a million. As the sun sinks and the French sky Sliemaud steps out into the garden where his sons are jumping on a trampoline.

His mind is still on the Neanderthal's demise, which he chooses not to attribute primarily to a changing climate or a demographic weakness. The moil Sapiens caused the Agartales to vanish almost instantaneously from the Annals of Archaeology. Slidnot says there's no need to deny our colonialist guilt, he says, or to seek solace in the strands of the Agartal DNA that live on inside us even after half a

million years on the planet. The Neanderthal's creativity and isolation didn't stand a chance against Homosapien's hyper efficiency and social networking. This was, he had said, a fully fledged conquest. Back in a rice field in northeastern laws Erex Suzonia's leading A brist Demeter's team of scientists toward a new cave several miles north of their base camp. In the past two decades, the international team has worked on a single mountain, excavating a cluster of caves that has yielded a rare

trifecta of ancient human species. In additions of discovering the nissoban rola, the team has unearthed postils of ancient Homo sapiens in one cave and in another of one hundred fifty thousand year old too, most likely from Homo erectus. This is an incredible result, but we're also looking at just one site, says Laura Shackelfert, an American pale anthropologist with the University of Illinois, Urbana Champagne and a National Geographic explorer who began working with the team in Laos

in two thousand and eight. Dinizaban remains have to be all over the place, and we just haven't found them yet. The future of the distant pass seems to lie in Asia, a region that Demeter calls a blank slate compared to Europe. It started with the astonishing discovery of two diminutive habit populations, Homo floresiensis in Indonesia in two thousand and three and Homo luzon mensis in the Philippines in twenty nineteen. The

focus has now shifted to China. Ever since the Jahi mandibal was identified in twenty nineteen, Chinese paleo anthropologists have raced can re examine the country's vast possi collections, dusting off their cold cases to see if they too might containing the Muzaban relics. Two archaic jawbones, one dug up west of Beijing, the other dredged from the Taiwan Strait

our close physical matches with the mandible. If their identity is confirmed as expected, it will mean that the misavans ranged over all of mainland Asia, perhaps centering on what is now Chinese territory. Chinese researchers have begun to reshape long standing consumptions about what when we branched off from

our fellow prominence. A recent phylogenetic study of one Chinese skull pushed back our divergence from Theangartals and Dinizebans by three hundred thousand years, shaking long held beliefs about whether our common ancestor even lived in Africa. Then there's the Harbin skull, found in nineteen thirty three by a worker in northeastern China and hidden in a well for the

rest of the twentieth century. The one hundred forty six thousand year old fossil could belong to a hominym relative closer to modern humans than either Niagartals or Dinizibans, a tantalizing clue that inches us nearer to the identity of our common ancestor. Some scientists think the Harbin skull could represent a branch of the Dinizivan family, or even a completely different lineage. Local pale anthropologists gave the lineage a

distinctuished Chinese label Homo longe or a dragon man. The Harbin skull was the basis for the model constructed by paleo artists John Girch and Kenny explored in detail. Over the past few years, Beijing has invested heavily in genetics and paleo proteomics, labs and in a new generation of scientists to close the research gap with the West. Unlike LAOS, China does not allow human fossils to leave the country for analysis, nor does it offer much access or a

transparency perform foreign scientists. Many young Chinese scientists like Don Jizo, however, nurturious spirit of collaboration. Last summer, she invited a dozen foreign scientists, including Velg and Demeter, to Western China for an international symposium on the Nizivans. You cannot work and publish alone, Demeader says, and neither help and they need powers. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for to day.

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