Traces of long-lost human cousins may be hiding in modern people’s DNA, a new computer analysis suggests. People from Melanesia, a region in the South Pacific encompassing Papua New Guinea and surrounding islands, may carry genetic evidence of a previously unknown extinct hominid species. That species is probably not Neandertal or Denisovan, but a different, related hominid group. This mysterious relative was probably from a third branch of the hominid family tree that produced Neandertals and Denisovans, an extinct distant cousin of Neandertals. While many Neandertal fossils have been found in Europe and Asia, Denisovans are known only from DNA from a finger bone and a couple of teeth found in a Siberian cave. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dna-data-offer-evidence-unknown-extinct-human-relative
The German government was becoming a little dissatisfied with the state of the spelling of German words in the 19th century. They did not want written German to become the nearly incoherent hodgepodge of spellings that represented the way words were pronounced 300 years earlier like French, or even worse, 700 years earlier like English with its hodgepodge of silent letters like "could" and "weight." So they decreed spelling reform. As a result, the Neander Valley, which was spelled "Neanderthal" in 18th century German, with a silent H, was re-spelled more phonetically as "Neandertal." This is the way the name is spelled on German maps. Unfortunately, the rest of the world had already adopted the name "Neanderthal" to mean the fossils of an earlier species of humans which had been first discovered in the Neander Valley. Once it had been universally established in paleontology books throughout the world, there was no way to change the spelling. So although the Germans refer to the geographical region as the Neandertal, when it's used to refer to the prehistoric humans, all over the world it is always spelled "Neanderthal." Nonetheless, I don't know if German scientists spell it this way. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
