As I report in today’s New York Times, scientists have sequenced the full genome from a 50,000-year-old finger bone from a Siberian cave, and they’ve concluded it belonged to a new lineage of humans they call Denisovans. These Denisovans, they argue, share an ancient common ancestor with us that lived, perhaps, 600,000 years ago–long before our species Homo sapiens arose. A couple hundred thousand years later, their branch of hominin evolution split, with one lineage evolving into Neanderthals, and the other into Denisovans. Much later, the Denisovans mated with Homo sapiens expanding out of Africa into southeast Asia, and today their DNA can still be found in the people of New Guinea and neighboring islands.

Continue reading “Denisovans: Ordinary humans with extraordinary genes?” →

Scientific American is featuring an excerpt from Brain Cuttings, my new e-book about the frontiers of neuroscience. It’s an account of my wanderings through the science fiction world of the Singularity, pondering whether we’ll be uploading our brains someday to computers. The piece started out as an assignment for Playboy, which they published earlier this year; I then reworked the piece for the e-book. Check it out.

And if you have a subscription to Scientific American, please check out my feature in the January 2011 issue, called “100 Trillion Connections.” There, I expand on one of the key topics I discuss in my e-book excerpt: how the brain is a network of networks (of networks), and only by understanding their organization will we finally come to terms with the complexity of the mind.

Originally published December 22, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

Last March I wrote here about a 50,000-year-old pinky bone found in a Siberian cave that might belong to a previously unknown kind of human. Scientists had isolated mitochondrial DNA from the bone, which suggested that it belonged to a separate lineage that was neither Neanderthal nor human.

Continue reading “Meet the Denisovans, the newest members of the human tree of life” →

In Tuesday’s New York Times, I have an article about an unlucky group of Neanderthals, massacred and cannibalized 50,000 years ago. Through some detective work, scientists have determined that they were members of an extended family. Here’s the paper (open access) if you want the gory details. While the interpretation the scientists present is not embraced by all the experts I contacted, they are excited at the prospect of this kind of fine-grained Neanderthal DNA sequencing. Of course, the lecture I gave last week now feels short a slide or two!

Originally published December 21, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

On my latest podcast, I talk to Jeff Gralnick of the University of Minnesota about electricity and life. In particular, we talk about how some bacteria generate electric currents as they feed–and how we might harness their power. Check it out.

Originally published December 20, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.