DNA from Denisova Cave bones reveals an unknown Ice Age bovine
Nicknamed 'yak X', the animal split from the ancestors of the modern yak about 400,000 years ago and may have been hunted by Denisovans
Translated from the Portuguese original by the Panorama newsroom. Read in Portuguese
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Bone fragments found in Denisova Cave, in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, have revealed a previously unknown species of Ice Age bovine, according to Folha de S.Paulo. The study was published in the scientific journal Current Biology.
The researchers analyzed 20 bone fragments, 14 from the cave and six from other sites in the region, and obtained 20 ancient genomes. The oldest sample is about 250,000 to 200,000 years old, and the most recent is 27,000 years old. According to the genetic analysis, the lineage split from the ancestors of the modern yak roughly 400,000 years ago.
Because DNA data alone are not enough to give a species a scientific name, the team is provisionally calling it yak X. Geneticist Love Dalén, of the Centre for Palaeogenetics, a collaboration between Stockholm University and the Swedish Museum of Natural History, stressed that it is unusual to identify a large mammal from such small fragments and said he imagines the animal looked more like a yak than a bison.
Yak X is thought to have lived alongside aurochs, woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, horses and large predators on the so-called mammoth steppe. The data suggest the species may have suffered a population decline during a warming period about 120,000 years ago and disappeared some time after the most recent sample.
The cave became famous in 2008, when a finger bone found there provided the first evidence of the Denisovans, extinct relatives of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. For Dalén, it is reasonable to assume that yak X was part of the diet of these hunter-gatherers.