There is no convincing evidence for how humans appeared on Earth. Science has provided some theories about human origins, but not everyone likes them. There are a number of experts who support the ancient astronaut theory which is widely acclaimed by people around the world. In 2013 scientists discovered the oldest evidence of human DNA from a 400,000-year-old thigh bone. Instead of resolving human history on Planet Earth, it deepened the mystery, leaving scientists perplexed.
The origins of our ancestors may be revealed by the discovery of 400,000-year-old human remains at the Sima de los Huesos site (Spanish meaning “bone pit”), a cave 43 feet below the surface of northern Spain. Although the bone is human it has “ALIEN DNA”. This surprising discovery has caused scientists to reevaluate everything they believe to be true about human evolution.
The ancient bones from which the genetic material was discovered in Spain have been attributed to Neanderthals, but the Denisovans, a different ancient human group from Siberia, have a surprisingly similar genetic profile.
Since its discovery in the 1970s, the Bone Pit and the bones it contains have been the subject of extensive research. The bones of 28 ancient people tentatively identified as Homo heidelbergensis dating back hundreds of thousands of years have been discovered so far. Due to their size and shape it was initially assumed that the 400,000-year-old bones belonged to Neanderthals, an extinct species of ancient hominid that was on a different branch of the evolutionary tree from our ancestors.
The thigh bone of a 400,000-year-old hominin from Sima de los Huesos, Spain.Credit…Javier Trueba, Madrid Scientific Films
The DNA that was extracted from these prehistoric bones suggests that there may have been many more ancient human species than previously believed. Another hypothesis is that these unidentified individuals discovered in the Bone Pit were common ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans. Mitochondrial DNA may have disappeared from Neanderthals at some point, but it persisted in Denisovans according to the study authors.
“Now we have to rethink the whole story,” said Juan Luis Arsuaga, a paleoanthropologist at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and co-author of the paper. He doubted that Denisovans were spread across much of the Old World, from Spain to Siberia, disguised as Neanderthals.
Methods for recovering DNA fragments were invented by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute and his colleagues, who published a snippet of DNA from a Neanderthal fossil about 40,000 years old in 1997. After their first success they and other researchers expanded by looking for DNA from other Neanderthals.
In 2006, a team of French and Belgian researchers obtained a 100,000-year-old fragment of Neanderthal DNA that until its 2013 discovery held the record for the oldest human DNA ever found. The previous revelation helped provide insight into how Neanderthals and humans diverged hundreds of thousands of years ago from a common ancestor. Furthermore, it demonstrated that around 50,000 years ago, humans and Neanderthals interbred.
The skeleton of a hominid recovered from Sima de los Huesos.Credit…Javier Trueba, Madrid Scientific Films
Further research revealed that 1% of the Denisovan genome originated from a different, mysterious relative that experts called a “super-archaic human.” According to estimates, some modern humans may possess 15% of these “super-archaic” genetic regions. This study establishes a close relationship between the Sima de los Huesos people and Neanderthals, Denisovans, and an unidentified population of early humans. So who was this unidentified ancestor of humans?
Homo erectus, an extinct predecessor of modern humans who lived in Africa about a million years ago, may be an unidentified ancestor. The point is that we never discovered any H. erectus DNA so at this point the most we can do is speculate.
In 2018 scientists published their findings about “dark matter” DNA, which are long, winding strands of DNA with no obvious functions but are identical in all vertebrates from humans to mice to chickens. Earlier scientists used to think that less than 2% of our DNA actually codes for humans and the remaining 98.5% of DNA sequences is the so-called “junk DNA” which is useless.
Although science is still evolving and trying to understand the purpose of our DNA, some studies seem to show that intracellular environmental and energetic influences can alter DNA. In biology, epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in phenotype that do not involve changes in the DNA sequence.
Alternative explanation
However, some theorists have advanced some extremely intriguing ideas. The so-called 97% of non-coding sequences in human DNA according to this argument are nothing less than the genetic code for extraterrestrial life forms. According to them some form of highly developed extraterrestrial race deliberately altered human DNA in the distant past and the unidentified “super-archaic” ancestor of the Sima de los Huesos people may serve as proof of this induced development.
There are numerous ancient sculptures that resemble the double helix motif of DNA which has led theorists to speculate that our DNA was modified in the distant past. An interesting idea is the concept of the “third eye” that ancient cultures knew about. The speculative invisible eye generally described as located in the pituitary gland of the brain is believed to provide perception beyond ordinary vision. The pine cone-shaped gland symbols appear linked to strange beings that appear to be leading some alteration of the “Tree of Life”. For some, the tree seems to symbolize DNA and human vertebrae.