A Cave In Siberia Contained DNA From A Species No One Knew Existed

In 2008, Russian archaeologists found a tiny finger bone fragment inside Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. In 2010, the Max Planck Institute sequenced its mitochondrial DNA — and it matched nothing. Not Homo sapiens. Not Neanderthal. It belonged to an entirely unknown species of human that had diverged from our lineage over a million years ago. They were named the Denisovans — an entire branch of humanity identified not from a skull or skeleton, but from a bone the size of a grain of rice and a single molar tooth.
The cave has since yielded something even more extraordinary: a bone fragment from a teenage girl whose mother was Neanderthal and father was Denisovan — the first direct evidence of a first-generation hybrid between two archaic human species. Denisovan DNA lives on today — up to six percent of the genome of Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians, and traces in populations across East and Southeast Asia. Their high-altitude survival gene, EPAS1, was inherited by Tibetans and still allows them to thrive above four thousand meters. One cave, one bone, one species that rewrote human evolution.
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📚 SOURCES:

Krause, J. et al. — "The Complete Mitochondrial DNA Genome of an Unknown Hominin from Southern Siberia," Nature (2010)
Reich, D. et al. — "Genetic History of an Archaic Hominin Group from Denisova Cave," Nature (2010)
Meyer, M. et al. — "A High-Coverage Genome Sequence from an Archaic Denisovan Individual," Science (2012)
Slon, V. et al. — "The Genome of the Offspring of a Neanderthal Mother and a Denisovan Father," Nature (2018)
Huerta-Sánchez, E. et al. — "Altitude Adaptation in Tibetans Caused by Introgression of Denisovan-Like DNA," Nature (2014)

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