Interesting

New hominin found via mtDNA

--this time from a cave upon a mountainous steppe in Siberia.

Homo erectus, the first hominin to move from Africa to Eurasia, did so 1.9 million years ago. After that, two known migrations occurred: Neanderthals are thought to have left Africa between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago, while early modern humans -- immediate ancestors of Homo sapiens -- took a later wave, migrating some 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. However, because the lineage of the hominin whose finger was found in the cave split off before Neanderthals and early modern humans arrived, the researchers speculate that that this new human form must have moved to Eurasia after H erectus but before Neanderthals -- probably a couple of hundred thousand years after the divergence.

All this information came from extracting mitochondrial DNA from the pinky bone of a small child in a manner to keep from contaminating the results with researcher's own material. The new hominin's DNA was compared with a variety of other known species (modern humans, Neanderthals, and the bonabo, for example) and came up with unique features.

I find what they can tell through DNA these days to be fascinating. If I'd stayed a biology major, I might have gone into that instead of oecology, but it was all so new then.