Denisovans are often described as "mysterious" or "enigmatic". Not so surprising, perhaps, since the number of fossils from this human species has so far been extremely few.
It all started as recently as 2008 when researchers found a small piece of a finger bone in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains in southern Russia. With the help of this small piece of bone, the Swedish researcher Svante Pääbo and his colleagues were able to show two years later that the bone actually belonged to a species of its own. A man who lived in parallel with the Neanderthals and the species we ourselves belong to, the modern man or Homo sapiens. The new species was named after the Denisovan man cave.
Since then, a few more fossils have been found, including in Tibet, but on the whole, most of this man has been shrouded in obscurity. Not least how she looked. Now researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences have analyzed a number of skull fragments found between 1976 and 1979 at the Xujiayao archaeological site in northern China.
Among other things, the researchers focused on the presence of a special variant of a collagen protein, COL1A2-996K, which was already known to exist in the Denisovan, but not in either the Neanderthals or our own species. The result, which was recently presented in the journal Nature, shows that the skull fragments belonged to Denisovan man and not to the even older ancient man as previously thought.
With the help of these skull fragments, the researchers have now, for the first time, made a qualified estimate of what the Denisova people actually looked like. The researchers compared the fragments with fossils from Neanderthals and other, now extinct, human species as well as modern humans, and then pieced them together using a 3D modeling computer program. The result shows that the Denisova man by all accounts had a very distinct appearance. Among other things, a sloping forehead with very prominent eyebrow arches. In addition, she had rectangular and deep-set eye sockets and a somewhat flattened face. According to the researchers, the appearance can be compared to a combination, or a kind of mixture of characteristics from certain older human species and from later species, such as the Neanderthals and our own species. Quite like us, in other words, but still not.
The findings also say something about the distribution of the Denisovans, that they were probably spread over a much larger area than just southern Russia and Tibet. In addition, the fragments in question are reminiscent of many other fossil finds made over the years in various places around East Asia, but which have not yet been identified as fossils from Denisovan man. Therefore, the researchers believe that the species' distribution area may expand further.
Previous research has shown that Denisovan people were more common in East Asia than in other parts of Eurasia, which is the large landmass that includes both Europe and Asia. Because while people who have their genetic origins in Europe have no Denisovan genes at all, the genetic mass of people from East Asia often consists of one or a few percent of such genes. The highest percentage of them all, as far as is known, is found in the Magbukon people of the Philippines, as researchers at Uppsala University showed a few years ago. Five percent of their genome consists of genes that originated with the Denisovans, making this people their closest living relatives.
