Archaeologists Found Something Beneath A Chinese Mountain That Doesn't Match Human History

In 1980 a monk meditating in a cliff cave on the Tibetan Plateau looked down and picked up half a fossilised jaw. It sat in a Lanzhou drawer for nearly forty years, unnameable, too heavy and chinless to be modern, wrong for erectus, part-Neanderthal and part not. The DNA was long gone, so in twenty nineteen scientists read the protein in a tooth instead, and it answered: Denisovan, a people until then known almost entirely from a single Siberian finger bone two thousand kilometres away. The jaw sits at three thousand two hundred metres, in air with forty percent less oxygen, at least a hundred and sixty thousand years old, which drags proven human presence up there back by roughly a hundred and twenty thousand years. What gets me is the inheritance, because the gene that lets modern Tibetans thrive at altitude without their blood thickening was handed to them by these people, useless to anyone until nine thousand years ago. They vanished as a people and left the one thing that made the mountain survivable. Stay for the youngest bone in the cave, and how close it sits to us.

archaeology #history