( CNN ) -- An overlooked female pinkie bone put in storage after it was discovered in a Siberian cave two years ago points to the existence of a previously unknown prehistoric human species , anthropologists say . And the lineage of that species may survive today in some people in Papua New Guinea and nearby islands , scientists say . A report on the discovery of the finger was published in the December 23 edition of the scientific journal Nature . Anthropologists say the 30,000- to 50,000-year-old finger is evidence of a new population of hominids they call Denisovans . The name is derived from the southern Siberian cave in which the finger bone was found . Geneticists say the finger probably belonged to a 6- or 7-year-old girl . `` The whole story is incredible . It 's like a surprising Christmas present , '' said Carles Lalueza Fox , a Spanish paleontologist not involved in the research who was quoted in the online article . The 3 billion-letter nuclear genome derived from the child 's finger shows that the ice-age population of early humans was more diverse than previously thought . Also , a comparison of the genome to modern humans indicates that Melanesian inhabitants of Papua New Guinea and various South Pacific islands inherited as much as 5 percent of their DNA from Denisovans . The genome research was conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig , Germany . The Denisovans , the scientists say , were more closely related to Neanderthals than modern humans . The discovery in Siberia suggests they may have lived across a wide swath of Asia and are likely to have intermingled with the ancestors of modern humans who migrated eastward from Africa .
A small bone found in a cave in Siberia could indicate a new species of early humans . DNA of `` Denisovans '' is found in modern Melanesians . The finger belonged to 6- or 7-year-old girl , anthropologists say .