Non-Fiction Writing Example (unedited)...

When we think about life on earth in the distant past, we often think of the dinosaurs that ruled the day. However, this new discovery by a team of French and American palaeontologists has revealed that the first humans to live on the planet actually were part of a much more ancient community of early humans than previously known. According to a report in the Daily Mail, the fossils of the so-called “Homo floresiensis” (pronounced “flairs”) have been unearthed in the Altai Mountains of central Asia. They date back around 3.2 million years.

What's more, they show that Homo floresiensis was at least as advanced technologically as our own species. “We didn't know the true population size of our direct ancestors, because it was so small and we didn't have the technology to extract fossils. If we had, we could tell them apart from the living things on the planet today,” says David Siegel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and lead author of the study. The research, funded by the National Science Foundation, is detailed today in the journal Science Advances.

The study looked at what evolutionary biologists call “mitochondrial genomes”—the DNA inside cells' organelles. Mitochondria are the battery that stores the energy and genetic information of a cell and provides energy for the cells' many other functions. The researchers had previously found that people living today have two types of mitochondria. 

While people living in the Amazon are a mix of these two types, they have two more mitochondria than people living in Europe or the United States, which may help explain why they live longer. While it isn't clear how this relates to longevity, the study points out the importance of mitochondria to health.