Newfound DNA Helps Scientists Discover an Ancient Human Species

Cindy Pu

Scientists have found the matching DNA to a human species they discovered 15 years earlier known as Denisovans.

In a Siberian cave called Denisova, Dr. Qiaomei Fu and her colleagues found a pinky bone that belonged to a girl from a 66,000-year-old relative to humans today that scientists had never seen before. The name that scientists gave this group of people was the Denisovans, after the cave they were discovered in.

People wanted to know “who are the Denisovans and what do they look like,” including many scientists like Dr. Fu. Fu and her colleagues soon discovered a skull in China with DNA and protein from a Denisovan. Everyone was excited about the new discovery.

This skull is very precious to scientists because it was almost lost forever. In 1933, the skull was discovered on a construction site in Harbin, China by a laborer. He hid it in an abandoned well when he suspected it had some sort of value but never spoke of it again until shortly before his death. In 2018, his family found the skull and donated it to Hebei GEO University for paleoanthropologists and scientists to study. They concluded with a result of the fossil being at least 146,000 years old.

Dr. Fu and other scientists studied the skull to see if it was a Denisovan but had only discovered proteins in the skull. Not one easy to give up, Dr Fu decided to try one last time to look for DNA in the mouth of the skull. She knew that as plaque builds up in the mouth, it traps bacteria, and sometimes also a few cells. What Dr. Fu and her team found was a bunch of bacteria, and tiny fraction of a cell. They analyzed the cell to discover it was Denisovan.

This Harbin skull is proof that Denisovans did exist, and the more scientists discover about them, the more people will know about the ancestry of humans. The Harbin skull and the girl’s pinky bone are examples of the oldest and younger generations of Denisovans.