400,000 year-old human DNA adds new tangle to our origin story......400,000-year-old human DNA adds new tangle to our origin story It's easier to...

The oldest human DNA ever recovered is throwing scientists for a loop: The 400,000-year-old genetic material comes from bones that have been linked to Neanderthals in Spain — but its signature is most similar to that of a different ancient human population from Siberia, known as the Denisovans.

The researchers who did the analysis said their findings show an “unexpected link” between two of our extinct cousin species. Follow-up studies could crack the mystery — not only for the early humans who lived in the cave complex known as Sima de los Huesos (Spanish for “Pit of Bones”), but for other mysterious populations in the Pleistocene epoch.

“Ancient DNA sequencing techniques have become sensitive enough to warrant further investigation of DNA survival at sites where Middle Pleistocene hominins are found,” the research team, led by Matthias Meyer and Svante Pääbo of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, wrote in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature. (“Hominin” is the currently accepted term for humans and our close evolutionary cousins.)

As anthropologists are getting better at extracting DNA from ancient bones, genetic mysteries are cropping up more frequently: Last month, researchers at scientific meetings talked about not-yet-published findings that hinted at interbreeding among Neanderthals, Denisovans and previously unknown populations of early humans.

A new standard