A new discovery about the Denisovans

Satisfied with their massive breakthrough, the scientists dubbed the species Denisova to credit the cave where they found the specimens. Aside from what they could interpret from the DNA, only little was known about this ancestor. Denisovans are known from only a few remains, and, consequently, much of what is known about them only comes from little DNA evidence. However, another good news came in 2012 when another research at the same location in Siberia discovered another small fragment of bone.

At first, researchers combined the unremarkable fragment with the numerous animal fossils that they also retrieved from the cave. It wasn’t until two years after that the University of Oxford’s Samantha Brown gave a closer look that the fragment’s true nature was revealed. Brown was tasked with categorizing the artifacts, and when she analyzed the proteins inside the bone artifact, she realized that it had actually come from an ancient human.