HUMAN EVOLUTION × GENETICS

The Denisovans

~300,000 to 50,000 years ago

Phanerozoic · Cenozoic · Quaternary · Pleistocene · Chibanian

A single finger bone from a Siberian cave gave up a genome belonging to no human group anyone had named. Bones remain almost non-existent: a jaw, some teeth, fragments of skull. Everything else known about them comes from the DNA they left in living people, and that DNA describes at least three separate meetings with three distinct Denisovan populations, spread far beyond Siberia and adapted to different places.

Why it matters

No human population had ever been discovered by sequencing rather than by digging. And they are still doing work: the version of a gene they passed on is what lets people in Tibet live comfortably at altitudes that make other populations ill.

Dating & uncertainty

Denisova Cave was occupied by this group from roughly 300 to 50 thousand years ago. Their range is known mostly from DNA carried by living people, which implies populations far beyond Siberia, and traces of a late survival in island Southeast Asia.

Sources

1. Reich et al. (2010), Nature · Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia
2. Jacobs et al. (2019), Nature · Timing of archaic hominin occupation of Denisova Cave in southern Siberia
3. Ongaro & Huerta-Sanchez (2024), Nature Genetics · A history of multiple Denisovan introgression events in modern humans

Earth history as one day

23:59:545.7 s before midnight

if Earth’s 4.54 billion years were compressed into a single day