Denisovans

Researchers looked at DNA extracted from the remains of 13 Neanderthals that lived in Asia about 54,000 years ago and found some surprising relationships among them.Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) were a group of hominins that lived alongside and interbred with anatomically modern humans until their disappearance around 40,000 years ago. Recognizable for their barrel chests, stocky builds, and pronounced brows, Neanderthals are thought to have been bred out of existence; most everyone walking around today has…

A close-up of the tooth from a ‘birds-eye’ viewpoint. Credit: Fabrice Demeter (University of Copenhagen/CNRS Paris)Denisovans, a sister species of modern humans, inhabited Laos from 164,000 to 131,000 years ago with important implications for populations out of Africa and Australia.What connects a finger bone and some fossil teeth discovered in a cave in the remote Altai Mountains of Siberia to a single tooth found in a cave in the limestone landscapes of tropical Laos?The answer to this question has been established by…

Deep in the forests of Laos, in a cave in the Annamite Mountains, lay a single child's tooth. That tooth – an unassuming molar - could be from a mysterious species of human we know little about, and of which few remains are known to exist.  "Analyses of the internal structure of the molar in tandem with palaeoproteomic analyses of the enamel indicate that the tooth derives from a young, likely female, Homo individual," researchers write in a new study. The tooth, from the Tam Ngu Hao 2 cave, "most likely represents a…

In 2018, a child living in the village of Long Gua Pa in northeastern Laos approached a team of archaeologists, eager to show them a cave full of bones. The team began to chisel into the cave’s cementlike walls, exposing the remains of ancient rhinoceroses, tapirs, pigs, rodents—and a single, humanlike molar. Now, the researchers have identified the tooth as that of a Denisovan, mysterious cousins of Neanderthals and modern humans who likely died out about 30,000 years ago. The…