Todd's Blog

The archives at Core Academy got an early Christmas present this year: Thanks to an anonymous donor, we received this 1920s vintage notebook chronicling John T. Reid's alleged "Triassic shoe" fossil.  The notebook was Reid's personal scrapbook about the find and contains correspondence from Alfred Watterson McCann and Sir Arthur Keith , among others.  You can read about the subject of this notebook at Glen Kuban's site . Reid was a mining engineer who lived in Lovelock, NV, and from the reports I've seen on the web this morning, he seemed quite excited about "anomolous" fossils and archaeological remains. Since we only just received the notebook this morning, I haven't had much chance to study its contents, except to note that the original micrographs from the "Rochester Institute of Research" (presumably the Rochester Institute for Medical Research) are included in the notebook.  Having examined these photos, I am not convinc...

I'm sure that title got your attention. You might recall the unusual DNA found in Siberia from an unknown hominin dubbed "Denisovan."  The mitochondrial DNA turned out to be very different from any other hominin known at the time.  It was almost twice as different from modern humans than any Neandertals that had been sequenced. Now there's new mitochondrial DNA from a specimen from a cave in Spain, thousands of miles away, but this time, there's enough skeletal remains to give us some clues as to what sort of humans this DNA came from.  The DNA itself resembles the Denisovan DNA more than any other humans, which is kind of remarkable since it comes from a location so remote from the Denisovans.  The bones from the cave show a mix of characteristics found in Neandertals and Homo heidelbergensis .  Could they be more hybrids?  Must be... For me, since this new sequence is similar to the Denisovan DNA, I would conclude that these humans were descendants ...