300,000-year-old fossils reveal the origin of Homo sapiens

🧬 How can we reconstruct the face of an ancient human we have never seen? A team led by Prof. Liran Carmel at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem used ancient DNA extracted from a small finger bone of a teenage Denisovan, an extinct human lineage known only from fragmented remains, to infer their likely facial and skeletal anatomy. Instead of relying solely on DNA sequences, the team analyzed DNA methylation patterns, chemical marks that influence gene activity, and compared them across Denisova