Mysterious Ancient People Finally Have a Face
The Denisovans have been humanity’s biggest enigma for 15 years. It began with a tiny fragment of the pinkie bone from a Siberian cave. That’s where Dr. Qiaomei Fu and her colleagues discovered DNA in the fossil that discovered revealed a new branch of humans. They named these mysterious people the Denisovans, but their physical body was totally unknown for years.
Dr. Fu, a Beijing-based geneticist today, continued to help uncover additional Denisovan DNA in teeth, other bits of bone, and even sediments within caves. Miraculously, remnants of their DNA still linger within individuals alive today throughout Asia and the Pacific and show they had reproduced tens of thousands of years ago. But without skull or skeleton, the question lingered: “Who are the Denisovans?”
Now, Dr. Fu has a name to go with the face. She and her colleagues just made a historic announcement: there is both Denisovan protein and Denisovan DNA in a skull found in China. That is significant, of course, since the skull was almost destroyed. Discovered by a laborer in Harbin in 1933, it was dug into a well and not uncovered until 2018, after he told his family members about it some time before he passed away.
Researchers at Hebei GEO University, including paleoanthropologist Qiang Ji, analyzed the fossil. They concluded that it must have been be at least 146,000 years old. When it reconstructed its face, they found that it was a gargantuan man with flat cheeks, a broad mouth, no chin, a high forehead, deep-set eyes, and a bulbous nose. Inside his gargantuan cranium was a brain the same size as or slightly larger than a contemporary human brain, approximately 7% larger. Dr. Ji initially called this species Homo longi.
Dr. Fu did inquire, however, if it was a Denisovan or not. After years of analyzing with no luck, she was finally able to lay her hands on the Harbin skull. Small samples were taken from a tooth and the ear bone by her team, places which should be packed with genetic material. While they initially did not recover any ancient DNA, they did find 95 proteins strongly suggestive of a Denisovan origin. Not yet ready to abandon the dream of recovering DNA, Dr. Fu took a gamble: to look within the plaque in the teeth of the skull. And it paid off! They found Denisovan DNA, a “fascinating” discovery given the small amounts of DNA normally retained in plaque.
This DNA allowed Dr. Fu’s researchers to place the Harbin skull on the Denisovan family tree. It was in the same clade as the most ancient Denisovans found in the cave in Siberia and dated back around 200,000 years. To have one individual providing a “face” to an enigmatic group of humans is a massive scientific achievement. It adds depth to our understanding of ancient human diversity.
