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A petrified jawbone, which was dredged by a fishing net from the sea floor of 15 ½ miles (25 kilometers) off the coast of Taiwan, looked human, but for years it has not been unsuccessful to hold on to the human family tree.
Now scientists have been able to confirm the identity of the mysterious fossil known as PENGHU 1 by analyzing old protein fragments that are still attached to the jaw in teeth. The jawbone belonged to a Denisovan man after the knowledge published on Thursday in the magazine Science.
“We have stipulated in recent years and have shown that these proteins can survive longer than the DNA, and that if we have a decent recovery, we can say something about the evolution of a copy,” said Co -Autor Frido Welker, an Assocular Professor of Biomolecular Paleoanthropology at the University of Copenhagen in Globus -Institut of the university.
Fishermen who work off the coast of Taiwan have the bones of the old animals – elephants, water buffalos and hyenas – in their nets, relics of an ice age, when the sea level was lower and the ocean channel, dredged a land bridge.
The flat sea is visible at low tide in this coastal view on the Penghu Islands, a group of islands in Taiwan Straße, where the fossil was discovered on the sea floor. – Jay Chang
The Denisovan man probably lived in this country strip, which once existed between China and Taiwan. This discovery determines the third place that the enigmatic old people who were identified for the first time in 2010 have definitely lived and show that Denisovans occupied a variety of environments: Siberian mountains, the high -quality Tibetan plateau and the moist subtropical roast, added.
Unusual origin
Fischer who find fossils under their hook often sell their finds to antique transactions in which collectors pick them up, said co-author Chun-Hsiang Chang, curator of Paleontology in the Taiwan National Museum for Science. The museum contains thousands of fossils from the sea floor in its collection.
A collector brought the jawbone identified as Denisovan to the museum, which wanted to learn more about the copy, and Chang said he immediately realized that it was unusual and encouraged the collector to donate or sell the fossil to the museum.
In a paper compiled in 2015, it was argued that the fossil of the genus Homo belonged, the group, which includes our species, Homo sapiens and other old people like Neanderthals, could not extract old DNA from fossil and could not verify the exact species.
It was also not possible to date the fossil exactly. Scientists believe that it has an age range between 10,000 and 70,000 and 190,000 years and that it was low with the bone from sea level in this area.
Chang brought the copy to Copenhagen in 2022 in the hope of experiencing more of Welker and other scientists who were pioneering techniques in order to extract proteins from fossils, a field known as paleoprototomics.
Chang remembered airport safety in Copenhagen when he stopped him when the case contained the jawbone went through an X -ray machine. “They stopped me and wanted me to open (the case),” he said. “I thought you might arrest me.” Chang said he was only allowed to go after shaping his registration information and giving the security personnel “a very short human evolution hour”.
Before Welker and his colleagues test the jawbone, they tried an elephant bone and a pork bone from the same part of the sea floor to find out which extraction methods would work best and determine whether proteins were still present. The team found proteins and continued with the extraction.
Two amino acid sequences from the proteins obtained from the sample voted a complete set of genetic information from the Denisovan genome – which was sequenced by the DNA. In addition, the laboratory work recognized a kind of protein with a gender-specific peptide called Amelogenin, and y chromosome-specific peptides showed that this was male, said Welker.
Denisovan paradox
Denisovans were first identified in a laboratory with DNA sequences in 2010, which were extracted from a tiny fragment from finger bones that were found in the Denisova cave in Siberia’s Altai mountains how the group got their name.
The genetic analysis then showed that Denisovans like Neanderthals had once changed with early modern people. Traces of the Denisovan DNA, which were found in today’s people, indicate that the old species have probably lived in large parts of Asia, and the recent discovery of Denisovan fossils from outside of their namesake has shown that they occupied a variety of places in Asia.
In 2019, the scientists shared the news that a jawbone in a cave on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, which is known as Xihe underneath, contained a molecular denisovan signature. A Denisovan ribbone from the same cave was reported in 2024.
In 2022, scientists identified a tooth in a cave in Laos as Denisovan because he very much resembled the tooth from the Xihe lower jaw. The note was given the species in Southeast Asia for the first time, although scientists could not receive any final molecular information from the molar to confirm it.
Denisovans had unusually large molars, experts say. Scientists have received genetic information about it through a few available fossils. – Jay Chang
Proteins that were detected in one of the teeth attached to the jawbone showed that it belonged to Denisovan man. – Jay Chang
The good preservation of the proteins in the PENNGHU 1 mandible is surprising because it was on the sea floor for a long time, said archaeologist Zhang Dongju, a professor at China’s Lanzhou University, who worked on the Xiah -Jawbone. She was not involved in the study.
“With the accumulation of Denisovan fossils and the increase in Denisovan’s identified molecular signature, the identification of Denisovan fossils will be easier,” she said. “And I think more Denisovan fossils are found and identified in (the) future. And we will learn more about these mysterious species.”
Katerina Douka, Associate Professor of Archaeological Science at the Austrian University of Vienna, described Denisovans as a paradox because scientists have detailed genetic information about the species, only a few fossils, as little about what they looked like, although they found that they had “exceptionally large” molars.
The mandibles in Penghu 1 and Xihe had no wisdom teeth, which indicates that their jaws did not protrude forward in the face, said Ryan McRae, a paleoanthropologist in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.
“None of the two lower jaws have a chin like modern people, so that the front of their jaw would probably look flatter than ours,” said McRae by e -mail. “The authors pointed out that the PENGHU undermine is male, which means that it can have the larger, more robust end of the variation of this kind. In other words, female Denisovans could look the same or completely different, we don’t know yet.”
Douka and MCrae were not involved in the study.
The mysterious people do not yet have a generally recognized official species name, although some scientists have proposed Homo Juluensis, a classification that grouped the Denisovan fossils with other fossils from China, including “Dragon Man”, a skull described in 2021.
Chang said that he and his colleagues hope to rethink the approximately 4,000 fossils in the National Museum of Natural Science from the sea floor in Taiwan Street in the last 40 to 50 years and use the same proteomic methods that are applied to the PENGHU 1 -Jawbone, whether other fragments that belong to the question of the denisovans.
“Maybe there is a treasure in my collection that we don’t know anything about,” said Chang.
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