The reward found the hero after tens of thousands of years
Reward for the Ancient Finger
Denisovsky man received the State Prize of the Russian FederationIn fact, the Denisov man did not receive anything, if only because the age of his famous finger fragment is 75-82 thousand years, but you can't get the word out of the title – VM.
Maria Rogovaya, "Russian Reporter" No. 23-2013
The winners of the State Awards of the Russian Federation in the field of science and technology have been announced. The director of the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the SB RAS, Academician Anatoly Derevyanko, is among the awardees. He is known as one of the authors of the discovery of the Denisov man, a new species of extinct humans that existed simultaneously with Neanderthals and homo sapiens. Andrei Fursenko, the assistant to the President of the Russian Federation, who announced the names of the laureates, said that this discovery could be ranked second in importance after the discovery of the Higgs boson
– Congratulations on your award…
- thanks. This is the highest and most honorable award in Russia, but I would like to emphasize that this is not only my merit, but also my colleagues. For the last 30 years, our institute has been running a program to study the problem of the origin of modern man and the oldest human migrations in Eurasia.
Hundreds of schoolchildren and students who are now adults, and they have their own families, have passed our expeditions in Altai. Many of them have become local historians and truly understand the historical and cultural heritage of the country. Expeditions of our institute work in Mongolia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Iran, and these are also large-scale works involving hundreds of people.
I can confidently say that this highest award was received thanks primarily to the participation of the Institute's staff and, of course, foreign colleagues. I would like to express special gratitude to my colleagues from the Max Planck Institute of Anthropology and, first of all, Professor Svante Paabo, because it was our cooperation with him that helped answer the question of who Denisovans are – a new subspecies that played a very important role in the formation of a modern type of man. Our research is now much discussed in the world scientific literature, as they contain a lot of additional material for the study of human genetic identity.
– Why has the Denisov man become such a debated topic all over the world?
– If the Neanderthal was found more than 150 years ago, then the Denisov man is a completely new discovery. Today, the genome of not only the Denisovan man, but also the Neanderthal man has already been sequenced based on the materials of the same Denisova cave. Many new directions in research are opening up.
The very hypothesis of the origin of a modern genetic, anthropological type of man will be read in a completely different way. The Denisov man has become really very discussed and popular in the world scientific press, because he left a noticeable trace in the genome of modern man, in particular the Polynesian peoples and the Australian aborigines. And then there are a lot of new questions about the place of the Denisov man in the pedigree of a modern type of man.
The work in the Denisova Cave allowed us to trace the evolution of human material culture for 300 thousand years. These are not only changes in the set of tools, but the whole complex: climate, ecology, fauna and flora. The most important discovery was brought to us by a find in the eleventh layer – the very fragment of the phalanx of the finger.
– And what new can be said about human evolution?
– I believe that a modern anatomical type of man was formed from four lines: Homo sapiens africaniensis (the central trunk from which the largest number of speciation proceeds), Homo sapiens orientalensis (its subspecies, oriental man), Homo neanderthalensis, which was previously considered the ancestor of man, and then crossed out (I think it needs to be returned back, after all, in the genome of modern man up to 4% of the Neanderthal) and Homo sapiens altaensis (Denisovan). That is, evolution was not linear, but multifactorial, and the Denisovan did not disappear without a trace, but his contribution to the genome of modern man was undoubtedly.
– Where will the research in Denisova Cave go next?
– Now researchers are facing the global problem of clarifying the relationship between Neanderthals and Denisovans, because the bone remains of both were found in the Denisova cave, which proves their coexistence.
If Professor Svante Paabo and his collaborators manage to investigate the DNA of the found anthropological materials from even more ancient horizons of the Denisova Cave – specifically the 12th and 21st, it will be an outstanding discovery. The conditions in which the remains were stored in the Denisova Cave make it possible to isolate DNA from materials that are tens of thousands of years old. At the same time, scientists do not always succeed in sequencing much less ancient DNA, because organic anthropological remains have been destroyed so much over thousands of years that they are no longer amenable to research.
In this regard, another difficult and important task is to find a trace of Denisovans in the remains of ancient people from other regions of the globe, primarily Polynesia and Melanesia. Many foreign archaeologists are working on this problem.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru13.06.2013