Bits and Bites from Around the World > Can the Dodo Bird be resurrected from extinction?

 

‘De-extinction’ of the dodo: Company to try resurrecting long-extinct bird

By Sarah Do Couto  Global News

Posted December 1, 2023 12:15 pm

View image in full screen

FILE - A 19th century illustration of a dodo. The company Colossal Biosciences announced in

November 2023 it would attempt to de-extinct the iconic bird and return the species to Mauritius. 

Getty Images via Andrew Howe

Not too unlike the plot of the movie Jurassic Park, a team of well-funded scientists are attempting to bring the extinct dodo back to life.

Last month, the billion-dollar genetics company Colossal Biosciences announced it would be partnering with a wildlife charity in Mauritius to try and bring one of the world’s most famously extinct creatures to the region again.

In a press release, the Dallas-based company said it would work closely with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation and the country’s government to return the dodo to its East African home, where it went extinct in 1681.

The company called the dodo  an “iconic bird and a symbol of human-caused extinction.”

The dodo, which was bigger than an average turkey, disappeared due to hunting by humans (it had no other predators) and the introduction of new animals to the region, making the dodo unable to compete in the wild.

Colossal Biosciences said the project will hopefully allow for improved conservation efforts for other already endangered animals in Mauritius. As part of their effort to revive and reinstate the dodo, the company and local wildlife officials said they will also remove invasive species, revegetate the region and increase community awareness.

The “genetic rescue” of Mauritius’ already vulnerable pink pigeon (Nesoenas mayeri) is a specific goal within the dodo “de-extinction” project. The pink pigeon was downgraded from being an endangered species in 2018, though the species still faces a difficult future as a result of inbreeding, disease and habitat loss. According to Colossal Biosciences, there are roughly 500 pink pigeons left in Mauritius.

By making room for the flightless dodo, conservationists and scientists from Colossal Biosciences hope they’ll save others like the pink pigeon from potentially facing the same fate.

A pink pigeon. Mauritius Wildlife Foundation

How will they make the dodo ‘de-extinct’?

As expected, it’s no easy feat to resurrect an extinct animal.

In their attempt to bring the dodo back, scientists will use genomic editing technology. The bird’s full genome has already been sequenced by Beth Shapiro, the lead paleo-geneticist at Colossal Biosciences.

To try and produce the dodo, the company said they will use interspecies surrogacy, namely with genetically modified chickens. According to the company, in theory, a chicken which has the hybridized primordial germ cells (or PGCs) of a dodo injected into its embryo may be able to produce offspring that resembles the extinct bird.

For its part, Mauritian Wildlife Foundation will build models for long-term management of the dodo to ensure it will thrive and be self-sustainable after its reintroduction to the wild.

It is not yet clear when Colossal Biosciences will be able to “de-extinct” the dodo — though company executives have fielded snide remarks about their projects for years now, including endless Jurassic Park comparisons.

“We’ve heard all of those comments over the years,” Ben Lamm, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told the Dallas Morning News. “But we have an opportunity to do it for good reasons because when you remove an animal from an ecosystem, that ecological void is felt. We’re not out to build things that shouldn’t exist. We’re focused on undoing the sins of the past and bringing back species to their native homes that mankind had a role in its demise.”

The dodo is not the first creature to be chosen by Colossal Biosciences for a potential second life. The company earlier announced it would also attempt to revive the Tasmanian tiger and woolly mammoth, both of which remain extinct.

===========================================================

Peter Ridd: Scientific Misconduct At James Cook University Confirms My Worst Fears

Dr Peter Ridd

Seven scientists expose massive scientific incompetence –  or worse – at James Cook University

The paper by Timothy Clark, Graham Raby, Dominique Roche, Sandra Binning, Ben Speers-Roesch, Frederik Jutfelt and Josefin Sundin (Clark et al., 2020) is a magnificent example of a comprehensive and very brave scientific replication study. The 7 scientists repeated experiments documented in eight previous studies on the effect of climate change on coral reef fish to see if they were correct.

This is, of course, the very basis is science - being able to replicate experimental findings!

Clark et al. (2020) found 100% replication failure. None of the findings of the original eight studies were found to be correct.

All the erroneous studies were done by scientists from James Cook Universities highly prestigious Coral Reef Centre. They were published in high profile journals, and attracted considerable media attention.

The major findings of the original studies that were found to be wrong were that high CO2 concentrations cause small reef fish to

* lose their ability to smell predators, and can even become attracted towards the scent of predators,

* become hyper-active,

* loose their tendency to automatically swim either left or right, and,

* have impaired vision.

This is the second time these 7 authors have got together to reveal a major scientific scandal. They were the whistle blowers of the infamous Lonnstedt scientific fraud in 2018. Lonnstedt, originally a PhD student at JCU, is also one of the scientists involved with these latest erroneous studies. She was found guilty of fabricating data in Sweden.

JCU has failed to properly investigate possible scientific fraud by Lonnstedt. Government funding agencies should insist that the highest responsible officer at JCU be sacked to send a message that institutions must take fraud seriously and not try to cover it up.

I was fired from JCU in 2018 after stating that work from JCU’s coral reef centre was not trustworthy. The latest work by Clark et al. (2020) is more evidence that those comments had considerable substance.

I was awarded $1.2M for wrongful dismissal by the Federal Circuit Court in 2019. JCU has appealed the decision which will be heard in May.

VICTORY: Climate Skeptic Scientist Peter Ridd Wins Big!

Replication and Science Quality Assurance

Clark et al. (2020) is exactly the type of replication study that I have been requesting for other scientific evidence regarding the Great Barrier Reef.

Such replication studies have been opposed by all the major GBR science institutions.

Clark et al. (2020) shows a 100% failure rate of the replication tests, which is higher than the science standard of about 50% failure rate for most peer reviewed literature.

Clark et al. (2020) demonstrates, yet again, the inadequacy of peer review as a quality assurance check for scientific evidence that may be used to develop important public policy decision.

I have been proposing an “Office of Science Quality Assurance” that would be in charge of replication and audit studies to test scientific evidence to be used for government policy decisions.

James Cook University (JCU) Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (ARCCoE)

The replication tests were performed on work mostly authored by scientists from JCU’s ARCCoE.

The 100% failure rate of these tests indicate that there is a serious quality assurance (QA) problem within that organisation.

I have been saying since 2015, in both public statements and the scientific literature, that the ARC COE has a QA problem. The head of the ARC COE made complaints to the Vice Chancellor of JCU about these public comments.

Those complaints led to my dismissal from JCU in 2018 after an almost unbroken 40 year association with the university.

Clark et al. (2020) demonstrates beyond doubt that my statements on Quality Assurance had considerable substance.

Scientific Fraud

No direct evidence of fraud was presented in Clark et al. (2020)

There is, however, considerable evidence of very lax scientific standards such as the lack of videoing of the behavioural experiments. This is a remarkable omission considering that videoing experiments is very easy. Combined with a 100% replication failure rate, it is clear that there was not an institutional culture of high scientific standards and integrity at the JCU ARCCoE.

Oona Lönnstedt, a PhD student at JCU, was trained within this lax institutional culture. She is an author of one of the studies tested in Clark et al. (2020).

She was later proven to be fraudulent by the very same authors of Clark et al. (2020) for work she did in Sweden.

There is compelling evidence that other work she did at JCU on Lionfish may be fraudulent.

The response of JCU to Lonnstedt’s fraud

JCU has failed to properly investigate Lonnstedt’s PhD and Post-Doc work at JCU since she was found guilty of fraud in Sweden. JCU has repeatedly said it would investigate with an external review but it appears that the committee to do this has not been appointed almost 2 years after she was found guilty of fraud in Sweden.

Scientific fraud is a serious issue. The integrity of science is at stake.

Failure to investigate fraud when there is a strong prime facie case that it has occurred is a far greater crime than fraud itself. It is a failure at the highest levels of an institution.

It demonstrates that fraud will be tolerated at James Cook University.

Suggested response by funding agencies

JCU receives large sums of tax payer funds and there is an expectation by science funding organisations that fraud would be properly investigated.

Science funding bodies, such as the Australian Research Council, should insist that a high penalty be paid by the highest officers of the University who were ultimately responsible for the failure to investigate possible fraud. 

If this does not occur, funding bodies should withdraw all support for JCU.

A message must be sent to other science organisations and universities that there is an expectation that fraud will be investigated properly.

Other

The results of Clark et al. (2020), as the authors mention, do not mean that ocean acidification is not a serious environmental threat. They reveal that the effect of high CO2 levels on reef fish behaviour is not a concern. As an aside, in my opinion ocean pH changes are a credible, though not proven, threat to the GBR. This is in contrast to other well publicised threats, such as from agriculture or modest temperature increases, which I do not believe are a significant threat.

Dr Peter Ridd — peterridd@yahoo.com.au

First Modern Brits were Black, Groundbreaking DNA Test on 10,000-year-old Fossil Reveals

Don't you just love irony?

© Justin Tallis / AFP

A pioneering genetic analysis of the UK’s oldest complete skeleton, which is around 10,000 years old, has revealed that the first modern Britons had a “dark to black” complexion.

The National History Museum carried out cutting-edge genetic sequencing and facial recognition technology on the ‘Cheddar Man,’ the skeleton found near Gough’s Cave in the Cheddar Gorge, and found that the first British settlers had dark skin, dark curly hair and possibly blue eyes.

The research on the Mesolithic fossil undermines the commonly held assumption that a people’s geographical origin is a determinant of skin color and physique.

“It really shows up that these imaginary racial categories that we have are really very modern constructions, or very recent constructions, that really are not applicable to the past at all,” said Tom Booth, an archaeologist at the Natural History Museum who worked on the project.

Most white people currently living in Britain are believed to have 10 percent of the skeleton’s DNA.

“The combination of quite dark skin and blue eyes is something that we don’t imagine is typical, but that was the real appearance of these people, something that’s quite rare today,” said Professor Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum.

Before the Cheddar Man’s lineage, there were around nine colonies of hunters, but it is understood that they were all wiped out by harsh temperatures. The Cheddar Man’s 12,000-man fort, however, thrived in the climate. They lived in tents and hunted boar and deer using hunting dogs, and bows and arrows.

Yoan Diekmann, a computational biologist at University College London and another member of the project’s team, agreed with Booth and called into question the link between Britishness and whiteness.

“The historical perspective that you get just tells you that things change, things are in flux, and what may seem as a cemented truth that people who feel British should have white skin, through time is not at all something that is an immutable truth,” he said.

The Cheddar Man was already known to have been around five foot five inches tall, around 10 stone in weight, with good teeth. He died in his early 20s.

The research is in stark contrast to a previous reconstruction of the Cheddar Man by the University of Manchester in 1998, which thought the British ancestor to be white-skinned. Director of the study, Robert Stoddard, is remarkably reported to have said that the Cheddar Man probably “looked pretty much like any modern inhabitant of a Somerset pub.”

The original model- composed without any access to genetic testing- also pictured the Cheddar Man to have straighter and lighter hair compared to the latest one.

“It may be that we may have to rethink some of our notions of what it is to be British, what we expect a Briton to look like at this time,” Dr Rick Schulting, associate professor of archaeology at Oxford University, told the Daily Mail.

Genetically, the Cheddar Man belonged to the “Western Hunter-Gatherers”, Mesolithic individuals from Spain, Hungary and Luxemburg.

His ancestors, however, are thought to have originated in Africa before moving to the Middle East and then Europe.

The European population has genes which are associated with reduced pigmentation, but the Cheddar Man was found to have “ancestral” versions of the genes, hence the new claim to “dark to black” skin tone.

Newly-Discovered ‘Monster Planet’ Upends Theories on Astronomy

Don't you just love it when scientific theory is proven to be wrong? Paleontology, archaeology, and astronomy are all based on assumptions and educated guesses which often prove to be completely false. Now, how planets form goes back to the drawing boards.

© warwick.ac.uk

A team of researchers has discovered a gas giant roughly the size of Jupiter orbiting a companion star smaller than our own sun. The discovery has upended current thinking on the limitations of planet formation in the universe.

NGTS-1b is the largest planet relative to its star ever discovered in the universe and dispels pre-existing theories that average-sized stars could not form gas giant planets of such immense size. It’s also the first planet discovered by the the Next-Generation Transit Survey observatory which hunts for new planets as they traverse their stars.

"The discovery of NGTS-1b was a complete surprise to us – such massive planets were not thought to exist around such small stars. This is the first exoplanet we have found with our new NGTS facility and we are already challenging the received wisdom of how planets form,” said Daniel Bayliss, the lead author of the research said in the University's press release.

I'm not sure 'wisdom' is the appropriate word here.

“Our challenge is to now find out how common these types of planets are in the galaxy, and with the new NGTS facility we are well-placed to do just that,” he added.

NGTS-1b is 600 light years away from us and is a gas giant roughly the same size as Jupiter but orbits a star only half the size of our own sun in terms of radius and mass. It’s as hot as Jupiter (530 degrees Celsius, 986 Fahrenheit)  and at least as large but possesses approximately 20 percent less dense. (density?)

However, it lies at just three percent the distance between Earth and our sun, meaning a year on the planet lasts just 2.6 days. The planet orbits a red M-dwarf star, the most common type of star in the universe, which leads researchers to believe there may be far more gas giants waiting to be found.

“NGTS-1b was difficult to find, despite being a monster of a planet, because its parent star is small and faint. Small stars are actually the most common in the universe, so it is possible that there are many of these giant planets waiting to found,” said Professor Peter Wheatley, head of the NGTS team.

“Having worked for almost a decade to develop the NGTS telescope array, it is thrilling to see it picking out new and unexpected types of planets. I'm looking forward to seeing what other kinds of exciting new planets we can turn up,” Wheatley said.

The observatory monitors the night sky and detects red light emanated by stars using ultra-sensitive cameras. In this particular instance, the system detected a break in starlight every 2.6 days. The team then tracked the planet's orbit around the star, allowing them to calculate the size, position and mass of NGTS-1b by measuring the radial velocity or the anomalies in its orbit due to variations in the planet's gravity.

9.7mn-yo Ape Teeth Puzzle Scientists, Challenge Timeline of Human Species

Questionable Science

I love it when scientists discover that what they believe is completely wrong. Too much science, especially in the field of archaeology and paleontology, is not science at all but guess work and the consequence of highly over-active imaginations. And many scientists think Christians are stupid.

Dig site near Eppelsheim, Germany © Naturhistorisches Museum Mainz

Ancient ape teeth dating back more than 9 million years and discovered in Germany last year are raising questions about the timeline of human evolution.

The two teeth, discovered in sediment of the Proto-Rhine River, are of an ape species whose remains have never before been observed in Europe.

Understood to belong to one ape, the two teeth are similar in structure to 3 million year old fragments belonging to an ape skeleton previously uncovered in Africa.

However, the German river bed remains, an upper right molar and left canine, predate the African example by more than 6 million years, according to a study published by the National History Museum Mainz.

The age disparity is puzzling since it raises questions over whether apes really originated in Africa.

While study author Herbert Lutz refused to be drawn on what it means for evolutionary theory, he said the findings indicate that there are still blind spots in the study of fossils.

“We want to hold back on speculation,” Lutz told Research Gate. “What these findings definitely show us is that the holes in our knowledge and in the fossil record are much bigger than previously thought.”

Not bigger than I previously thought! 

How the ape came to be in the Germany region near Eppelsheim is a “mystery,” Lutz said.

Maybe he was looking for a good beer, or a great glass of white wine? Schnitzel?

He added that if the ape is found to be related to the species observed in Africa 3 million years ago, then “[it] would mean that a group of primates was in Europe before they were in Africa.”

Science and Christianity - Who's Side is the Truth on?

University settles lawsuit with scientist fired after he found

soft tissue in dinosaur bones

By Chad Dou —

CSUN scientist Mark Armitage found soft tissue in a dinosaur bone, a discovery that throws significant doubt on evolution. Then, two weeks after publishing his findings, he was fired.

Now California State University at Northridge has paid Armitage a six-figure sum to settle his wrongful termination suit based on religious discrimination. While the university admits no wrongdoing, Armitage’s attorney said they feared losing a protracted lawsuit because of a “smoking gun” email that backed the plaintiff’s case.

The case of Armitage is the latest to show the mounting hostility Christians face in academics and other public arenas.

A Triceratops

“Soft tissue in dinosaur bones destroys ‘deep time.’ Dinosaur bones cannot be old if they’re full of soft tissue,” Armitage said in a YouTube video. “Deep time is the linchpin of evolution. If you don’t have deep time, you don’t have evolution. The whole discussion of evolution ends if you show that the earth is young. You can just erase evolution off the whiteboard because of soft tissue in dinosaur bones.”

Armitage was hired as a microscopist to manage CSUN’s electron and confocal microscope suite in 2010. He had published some 30 articles in scientific journals about his specialty.

A graduate of Liberty University, Armitage adheres to the “young earth” view,  against the majority of scientists who say our planet is 5 billion years old. He engaged students in his lab with Socratic dialogue over the issue of the earth’s age based on his and others’ research, he said.

In May 2012, Armitage went on a dinosaur dig at the famous fossil site of Hell Creek in Montana, where he unearthed the largest triceratops horn ever found there. Back at CSUN, he put the fossil under his microscope and made the startling discovery: unfossilized, undecayed tissue was present.

If the dinosaur were 65 million years old, the soft tissue could not have possibly remained, he says. His findings seconded groundbreaking discoveries by noted molecular paleontologist Mary Schweitzer, who triggered an earthquake in the world of paleontology when she published about soft tissue in dinosaur bones in 2005. (Schweitzer subsequently postulated that iron is responsible for preserving the soft tissue.)

Armitage’s February 2013 study was published in the peer-reviewed Acta Histochemica, a journal of cell and tissue research. Two week later, he found himself without a job.

A biology professor had come into his office and said, “We are not going to tolerate your religion in this department.”

Armitage fought back. Professors and students alike had praised his work managing the microscope lab. His suit alleged he was excluded from a secret meetings of the microscopy committee. In a “smoking gun” email, university officials suggested they could ease Armitage out of his part-time position by making it full-time, Reinach said.

A colleague described the process as a “witch hunt,” according to Inside Higher Ed.

For two years, CSUN fought Armitage’s lawsuit. The university alleged his firing was simply a restructuring of their biology department and not a case of religious discrimination. But CSUN lost its bid to have the judge summarily throw the case out of court as groundless in July of last year.

So CSUN settled with Armitage for $399,500 in 2016, according to Inside Higher Ed.

Alan Reinach, Armitage’s attorney, hailed the settlement as precedent-setting.

“We are not aware of any other cases where a creationist received a favorable outcome,” said Reinach, executive director of the Church State Council, a nonprofit California public interest legal organization. “This was truly a historic case.”

CSUN has downplayed its decision to settle, saying in a statement that the university is committed to religious freedom and freedom of speech.

“The Superior Court did not rule on the merits of Mr. Armitage’s complaint, and this voluntary settlement is not an indication of wrong-doing,” according to a CSUN statement published in Retraction Watch. “The decision to settle was based on a desire to avoid the costs involved in a protracted legal battle, including manpower, time and state dollars.”

But Reinach countered: “They certainly would not have paid that kind of money if they did not recognize that we had them dead to rights. The state doesn’t put large, six-figure settlement money out unless they are really concerned they are going to lose.”

Prior to looking for soft tissue in dinosaur bones, Armitage studied diatoms, unicellular organisms that make up phytoplankton, which reveal a dizzying complexity and organization at the microscopic level.

According to Armitage, the beauty and complexity of diatoms lends credence to the idea they are a product of a Creator and not of spontaneous evolution.

“Evolution is structure supported by two pillars: one is chance, and the other is time. Chance is required because we obviously can’t say that a thinking force created life on earth. That is anathema for the materialists. If you kick out one of those two pillars the whole structure collapses,” Armitage noted. “If you kick out chance by showing incredible design, the structure of evolution starts to totter and it may crash. Because you cannot have design in a world that doesn’t have a Designer.

“The other pillar is time because you cannot get a man from a frog unless the princess kissed the frog. That’s a fairy tale. So in science you have to have deep time to get evolution.”

Subsequent to the controversy, Armitage has been on additional digs and found more soft tissue but is finding it difficult to get published. “I’m clearly being blackballed,” he said in The College Fix.

“Soft tissue in dinosaur bones destroys deep time.” Armitage said. “Dinosaur bones cannot be old if they’re full of soft tissue.”

Alberta Creationist Discovers Rare Fish Fossils in Basement

Are they 60 million years old as a paleontologist estimates, 

or are they more like 4,500 years as their discoverer estimates?

Fossilized fish found during excavation in Calgary suburb

An Alberta, Canada man who discovered a school of rare fossilized fish while digging up a Calgary basement believes the world was created by God a few thousand years ago.

It's for that reason Edgar Nernberg doesn't think the fossils could possibly be as old as paleontologists are estimating.

"I subscribe to the creationist position, and I believe they were laid down in Noah's flood, about 4,500 years ago. But we agree to disagree."

He's referring to Darla Zelenitsky, the University of Calgary paleontologist who was brought in to examine the five ancient fish.

She says they likely swam in waters about 60 million years ago, which is the age of the Paskapoo Formation, a sheet of rock that lies under the city.

"I would give it a 10 out of 10 for significance," said Zelenitsky.

Creationist Edgar Nernberg

"There's not very many complete fossils known in rocks of this age in Alberta," she said about the fish, which are each about the size of a wallet.

Nernberg helped build the Big Valley Creation Science Museum and said he's good friends with the owner.

According to the museum website, Nurnberg donated "one of the more favourite displays" for visitors — the Evidence from Genealogy exhibit — which features scrolls that trace the genealogy of England's King Henry VI back to Adam and Eve.

While Nernberg hasn't lobbied the Alberta government directly to include creationism in the province's school curriculum, he said he has written opinion letters about the topic and sent them to several newspapers.

Alberta homeschool convention offers creationist textbooks

Nernberg found the near-perfect fossils concealed in a block of sandstone while working at his day job, excavating the basement of a new home in northwest Calgary.

Zelenitsky said that because the fish lived in a time shortly after the extinction of the dinosaurs, they could answer some questions about evolution.

The five fish fossils were encased in a block of sandstone in the Paskapoo Formation,
a 60-million-year-old rock formation that lies under Calgary. (Meghann Dionne/CBC)

"Plants and animals were actually recovering from the extinction at that time, so any fossils, particularly if they're complete, are going to help us reconstruct what was going in the environment after a major mass extinction."

Nernberg said he has come to "accept the fact that we all have different opinions."

The fossils are en route to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alta., to be studied by paleontologists.

"It's quite likely that these could be a new species," said Zelenitsky.

We have the five fishes, now if we just had three loaves we would really
have something to sink our teeth into

If that's the case, Nernberg said, he won't be offended if they're not named after him.

That will be the day, when paleontologists honor a creationist, or even acknowledge his existence. We've come a long way since the Scopes Monkey trial; whether it's all good or bad I will leave up to you.

Personally, I try not to take a firm position on this issue because I could quite adequately debate either side. I don't dismiss the science that makes a recent global flood unlikely; nor do I dismiss the Bible as a source of truth; and I certainly would never put God in a box and say, "this is impossible"! I believe He has some astounding surprises waiting to be revealed to us.

Neanderthals - Incest, Interbreeding and Possibly Pedophilia

Neanderthals liked to keep it in the family with DNA sequencing of an ancient toe revealing long-term inbreeding amongst a Siberian-based population.

The sequencing results, published today in the journal Nature, also reveal Neanderthals, early modern humans and a sister group to Neanderthals, Denisovans, met and reproduced in the Late Pleistocene between 12,000 and 126,000 years ago.

Alan Cooper, a professor at the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, says the study "completely rewrites what we know about human evolutionary history". I know it's not just me, but almost every real find in paleontology completely rewrites evolutionary history. That means that evolutionary history, as we know it, has always been wrong. Consequently, there is no good reason for us to believe that they've got it right now; the next discovery will rewrite it again and again.

"We now have a reasonably definitive picture of the mixing and matching of [hominin] groups through time," he says.

And according to Cooper, the research reveals that "everyone is bonking everyone else … it's quite impressive". Impressive is a curious word to use hear, but maybe I don't want to know why he used it.

First author of the paper Kay Prufer, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany says the findings are based on DNA extracted from a toe bone found in the Siberian cave where the first Denisovan fossils were discovered in 2008.

The toe bone belonged to a Neanderthal woman who they estimate lived about 50,000 years ago, he says, adding that DNA analysis shows the woman's parents were very closely related.

"We conclude the parents of this Neanderthal individual were either half-siblings who had a mother in common, double first cousins, an uncle and a niece, an aunt and a nephew, a grandfather and a granddaughter, or a grandmother and a grandson," the researchers write.

Reason for extinction?

Prufer says the analysis shows this inbreeding was not a rare event.

"The parents were very closely related, but even if you ignore that [DNA analysis shows] … the past parents of the parents were related," he says.

Prufer says the inbreeding suggests the Neanderthal population was quite small or fragmented and this may have played into their demise.

"Of course if you have a small population size you begin to move into the danger zone [for extinction]," says Prufer.

Cooper, who was not involved in the study, agrees: "If you are breeding with your uncle, your population is on the way out. The fact this group has been doing it for a while suggests it was in decline."

Or, maybe they evolved into gays and lesbians. That would bring a quick end to a civilization.

Reconstruction of Denisovan face

Interbreeding across species

As part of the study, the international team also compared genomes of Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern-day humans.

Previous research has shown that while Neanderthals contributed to the genetic heritage of all modern populations outside Africa, Denisovans contributed exclusively to populations in Southeast Asia and Oceania.

However Prufer says the analysis reveals the picture may be more complex.

Their study shows gene flow from Neanderthals to Denisovans indicating interbreeding between the two groups.

The Denisovan DNA also contained genetic material from an "unknown archaic human that lived a million years ago", says Prufer. Oh, yes, I remember him. He was Archie the Archaic! (No, I haven't been drinking!)

He says this "unknown archaic human" could be Homo erectus, but further analysis is needed to determine its origins.

Ancient human relative's DNA puzzles scientists

Prufer says by comparing the genome of the various hominin groups, researchers will also be able to pinpoint the "defining changes" in genome that genetically make modern humans.

Their work suggests the proportion of Neanderthal-derived DNA in all people outside Africa is about 1.5 to 2.5 per cent.

I know some people that definitely have more than 2.5% Neanderthal in them.

Modern day New Guinea man with Denisovan facial characteristics

'Complicated and messy'

Cooper says the findings show evolution works in a "complicated and messy fashion".

"And when you try and reconstruct evolutionary history by looking at modern genetic data you get it completely wrong," he says.

Now that's a startling statement from a scientist. Sounds like a Creationist talking. Is the interpretation of genetic data wrong, or is evolutionary history as we think we know it completely wrong. Well, we have just proven above that evolutionary history has been and undoubtedly still is completely wrong.

While the work is "very convincing" Cooper says it is unlikely to be the final version of evolution. Ya think?

"Five years ago we didn't even know of the existence of the Denisovans," he says.

"It is an incremental process [but] these discoveries are really changing how we think about human evolution."

Cooper says the sequencing of the genomes also opens up the possibility to "identify what bits of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA survive in us and what they might be doing".