The Denisovans Finally Have a Face: Milky Way News

EARTH, Laniakea Supercluster—The Denisovans have long been the ghost in humanity's family tree. A sliver of finger bone from a Siberian cave here, a few scraps there, and a whole lot of DNA.

Now the ghost has a skull, and it was hiding in plain sight.

In a study published Oct. 21 in Nature, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology reported that fossils from Xujiayao, in northern China's Nihewan Basin, belong to Denisovans. The 20 skull, jaw and tooth fossils were excavated between 1976 and 1979 and date to roughly 138,000 to 199,000 years ago, according to Archaeology News Online Magazine. They were filed as Neanderthals or archaic Homo sapiens, and most recently as a proposed species of their own, Homo juluensis.

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The study relies on paleoproteomics—reading ancient proteins, which survive in bone long after DNA has broken down. The team sampled two fragments, a piece of skull and a jawbone, and kept 18 ancient proteins after screening out contamination. One position in the collagen protein COL1A2 did the heavy lifting. Denisovans carry the amino acid lysine there, while Neanderthals and modern humans carry arginine. Both Xujiayao bones carried the Denisovan version, and a family tree built from 2,074 amino acid positions grouped them with known Denisovans.

With the identity pinned down, the researchers compared the Xujiayao bones with the Harbin skull—the original "Dragon Man," already identified as Denisovan—to sketch what the group had in common. Their picture is a low, wide skull with thick walls, a strongly arched temporal bone at the side of the head and a distinctive dip on the jaw, mixing traits seen in Homo erectus, Neanderthals and modern humans. The braincase recalls Homo erectus, the teeth look more like ours and the Neanderthals', and the back of the skull rises more steeply than in either, Live Science reported. The institute also released a reconstruction built from the analysis: a dark-haired man with a massive brow ridge, staring straight back at us. One Xujiayao skull held a brain of about 1,700 milliliters, within the range of people alive today.

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Based on anatomy alone, the authors propose that several other Chinese fossils, including Jinniushan, Dali and Hualongdong, also belong to the Denisovan lineage. That would stretch Denisovan history in East Asia from about 300,000 to 45,000 years ago.

That claim is the one to watch.

The protein evidence covers only the two Xujiayao fragments, and the wider reassignments rest on bone shape, which has fueled decades of arguments over how to name East Asia's ancient humans.

Even so, the shift matters beyond museum labels. Many living people carry Denisovan DNA. Now their ancestors may finally have faces to go with it.