Modern humans inherited part of their ancestry from multiple, genetically distinct Denisovan groups through interbreeding events. However, the history of contact with Denisovans remains unclear.

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A prominent brow ridge with a brain as large as modern humans and Neanderthals — that’s what the archaic human group, the Denisovans, looked like, according to work published this week in Cell 1 and ...

Fifteen years after the discovery of a new type of human, the Denisovan, scientists discovered its DNA in a fossilized skull. The key? Tooth plaque. By Carl Zimmer When Qiaomei Fu discovered a new ...

A 146,000-year-old skull from Harbin, China, belongs to a Denisovan, according to a recent study of proteins preserved inside the ancient bone. The paleoanthropologists who studied the Harbin skull in ...

For only the second time, researchers have obtained the full genome of a Denisovan, a group of ancient humans who lived in Asia. The DNA was extracted from a single 200,000-year-old tooth found in a ...

One of the biggest mysteries in human evolution has just been solved. In 2010, a groundbreaking genetic analysis revealed that east Asia was once home to a previously unknown group of enigmatic ...

Human evolution’s biggest mystery, which emerged 15 years ago from a 60,000-year-old pinkie finger bone, finally started to unravel in 2025. Analysis of DNA extracted from the fossil electrified the ...

A recent study has shed light on a unique group of people outside Africa who possess virtually no Denisovan DNA. This finding challenges previous assumptions about the interbreeding patterns of ...

For well over a century, we had the opportunity to study Neanderthals—their bones, the items they left behind, their distribution across Eurasia. So, when we finally obtained the sequence of their ...

A bone discovered in Taiwan turns out to have belonged to a Denisovan, a lineage previously identified only thousands of miles away. By Carl Zimmer For decades, fishermen sailing off the coast of ...

This finger bone discovered in Siberia in 2008 led to the original Denisovan discovery. Wikimedia, CC BY-SA It started with a finger bone found in a cave in the Altai mountains in Siberia in the late ...