“They can be athletes, they can be gymnasts, they can be ballerinas, they can be prostitutes…you are a beautiful girl who uses her body to make money so it’s kind of natural.” She continues: “It’s just normal to be a prostitute, for them…maybe it’s easier than being a model.”Ĭhosen specifically for her pre-pubescent looks, Nadya’s wide-set eyes and seductively pouty lips have just the right mixture of youth and sex appeal for a Japanese market. “All the girls just want to get out,” Ashley says. But because modeling is a notably tough industry to enter, she says, the girls who are chosen from local castings often end up selling their bodies in a more literal manner. Here, seven revelations from the frightening documentary.Īshley, a former model turned scout, scours the Siberian countryside for fresh faces to feed the insatiable hunger of the Japanese market. Language barriers on “go sees” and one failed booking after another quickly turns Nadya’s young career into Japan’s Next Top Model from hell. Her hours are long, often going days without time off at the commanding hand of her agent, Tigran. She lands in a pint-sized apartment, and shares a bunk bed and cloistered bathroom with another teen model.
According to the film, the cruel practices are widespread-though the film focuses only on Nadya, who has been plucked from her quaint life in the Siberian countryside with the promise of earning money to support her family with a fruitful modeling career in Japan.īut over the course of several heartbreaking months, she is mistreated in the chaotic and cold Tokyo fashion industry. You can follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.A revealing new documentary, Girl Model, which opens in select theaters on Wednesday, details the life of the 13-year-old Siberian schoolgirl and the modeling scout who discovers her. Nidhi Subbaraman writes about science and technology. The authors of "The complete genome sequence of a Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains" include Kay Prufer, Fernando Racimo, Nick Patterson, Flora Jay, Sriram Sankararaman, Susanna Sawyer, Anja Heinze, Gabriel Renaud, Peter Sudmant, Cesare de Filippo, Heng Li, Swapan Mallick, Michael Dannemann, Qiaomei Fu, Martin Kircher, Martin Kuhlwilm, Michael Lachmann, Matthias Meyer, Matthias Ongyerth, Michael Siebauer, Christoph Theunert, Arti Tandon, Priya Moorjani, Joseph Pickrell, James Mullikin, Samuel Vohr, Richard Green, Ines Hellmann, Philip Johnson, Helene Blanche, Howard Cann, Jacob Kitzman, Jay Shendure, Evan Eichler, Ed Lein, Trygve Bakken, Liubov Golovanova, Vladimir Doronichev, Michael Shunkov, Anatoli Derevianko, Bence Viola Montgomery Slatkin, David Reich, Janet Kelso and Svante Pääbo. "There is also an interesting question of what, if anything, Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA may be doing in the people that have it today, and whether it has been of benefit or detriment to our species," Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, who was unconnected with the work, wrote in a comment sent to press.įurther research into what those areas coded for may reveal why we, homo sapiens, lived on while Denisovans, Neanderthals, and scores of our hominin relatives vanished. "To me, it’s very satisfying," Pääbo said. This latest analysis, a culmination of nearly two decades of research, is the most thorough analysis to date.
In 2010, he led a team to publish a rough draft of a Neanderthal genome from a fossil found in a cave in Croatia. Neanderthal genome work began in 1997 when a team led by Pääbo extracted DNA from a 30,000 year old Neanderthal bone found in Germany. The entrance to the Denisova cave where researchers came across a fragment of bone from a Denisovan girl's pinkie finger in 2008, and uncovered the Neanderthal toe bone in 2010.
The full analysis of the Siberian Neanderthal genome is published in the Thursday issue of Nature. "It’s an inference from those other genomes."īy comparing genetic evidence of the Neanderthal female who lived some 50,000 years ago, with the sequence of a Denisovan girl published in August last year, Pääbo and team discovered a small but discrete signature of a much older species, which the paleoanthropologists suspect might be Homo erectus. "There is not even a bone splinter here," Svante Pääbo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said of the unknown species.