How’s this for impressive: a genome pieced together from a 30,000-year-old finger bone contains fewer errors than genomes generated using samples from living people. The genome, published online today, is from an extinct group of hominins called the Denisovans.
Fossils of the Denisovans, close relatives of the Neanderthals, werediscovered in Siberia in 2008. A draft genome was released in 2010 bySvante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, which revealed that Denisovans interbred with modern humans. However, each position in the genome was read only twice, so the fine detail was unreliable.
The new genome covers each position 30 times over. Pääbo plans to use it to estimate how much genetic variation was present among the Denisovans, revealing whether they suffered population crashes.
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