One Finger Bone In A Russian Cave Revealed A Whole New Type Of Human

In 2010, scientists at the Max Planck Institute sequenced DNA from a tiny finger bone found in Denisova Cave in Siberia. It didn't match Homo sapiens. It didn't match Neanderthals. It was an entirely new species of human — the Denisovans — identified not from a skull or skeleton, but from a single fragment of a child's pinky finger. Their genome revealed they interbred with our ancestors and left DNA still carried today by Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians at up to six percent — higher than Neanderthal ancestry in most Europeans. A Denisovan jawbone was later found on the Tibetan Plateau at over three thousand eight hundred meters elevation, and in 2019 researchers discovered that modern Tibetans inherited their high-altitude survival gene, EPAS1, directly from Denisovans. An entire species that once ranged from Siberia to Southeast Asia was discovered, mapped, and linked to living humans — all from one bone the size of a coffee bean.
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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 in Siberia," Nature (2010)
Meyer, M. et al. — "A High-Coverage Genome Sequence from an Archaic Denisovan Individual," Science (2012)
Chen, F. et al. — "A Late Middle Pleistocene Denisovan Mandible from the Tibetan Plateau," Nature (2019)
Huerta-Sánchez, E. et al. — "Altitude Adaptation in Tibetans Caused by Introgression of Denisovan-Like DNA," Nature (2014)

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