A team of scientists led by Dr. Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has almost completely sequenced the mitochondrial DNA taken from a femur of a hominid who lived about 400,000 years ago. It’s the oldest hominid DNA sequenced so far and gave unexpected results, revealing a genetic connection with the Denisova, a population of hominids still poorly known.