On June 11, Qiaomei Fu, a geneticist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, found that an ancient human skull was very likely what a new type of human looked like.

15 years ago, Dr. Fu discovered a new kind of human by finding a fragment of a pinkie bone in a Siberian cave called Denisova. After close examination of its DNA and proteins, she declared it to be the bone of a new human species, which she named Denisovans after its cave. At that time, Dr. Fu was only a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.

The Denisovans are believed to be a 66,000-year-old relative of today’s humans. The bone that started all of this research belonged to a girl who was “part of a third human lineage,” or a new ancestor for a part of humans, that was never known before.

Since then, , like in the teeth and bone fragments in the same cave where the pinkie finger bone came from. They were even found in modern people in Asia and the Pacific. However, there were no fossils or evidence of what the Denisovans looked like.

In 1933, a worker at Harbin, China, found a skull on a construction site and hid it in an old well, suspecting it was of value. However, he never retrieved it and finally told his family about it before his death. In 2018, his family dug the skull up and donated it to Hebei GEO University.

After closely examining the skull, Qiang Ji, a paleoanthropologist, and other scientists concluded that it belonged to a huge male person with “flat cheeks, a broad mouth, and no chin.” He had an imposing brow over his deep-set eyes and a bulbous nose. His large skull also contained a massive brain, about 7% larger than our normal human brain.

With permission from these scientists, Dr. Fu studied the Harbin skull for any traces of Denisovan DNA. In the inner ear, Dr. Fu and her team found 95 proteins that determined that this skull belonged to a Denisovan. However, there wasn’t any more useful DNA. Then, in the plaque on the skull’s teeth, she found a small amount of human DNA.