New protein analysis suggests Homo erectus passed genes to Denisovans, creating an indirect evolutionary link to Homo sapiens.

Ancient humans crossing the Bering Strait into the Americas carried more than tools and determination—they also carried a genetic legacy from Denisovans, an extinct human relative. A new study reveals ...

Modern humans inherited part of their ancestry from multiple, genetically distinct Denisovan groups through interbreeding events. However, the history of contact with Denisovans remains unclear.

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A prominent brow ridge with a brain as large as modern humans and Neanderthals — that’s what the archaic human group, the Denisovans, looked like, according to work published this week in Cell 1 and ...

Fifteen years after the discovery of a new type of human, the Denisovan, scientists discovered its DNA in a fossilized skull. The key? Tooth plaque. By Carl Zimmer When Qiaomei Fu discovered a new ...

For only the second time, researchers have obtained the full genome of a Denisovan, a group of ancient humans who lived in Asia. The DNA was extracted from a single 200,000-year-old tooth found in a ...

Human evolution’s biggest mystery, which emerged 15 years ago from a 60,000-year-old pinkie finger bone, finally started to unravel in 2025. Analysis of DNA extracted from the fossil electrified the ...

A 146,000-year-old skull from Harbin, China, belongs to a Denisovan, according to a recent study of proteins preserved inside the ancient bone. The paleoanthropologists who studied the Harbin skull in ...

For well over a century, we had the opportunity to study Neanderthals—their bones, the items they left behind, their distribution across Eurasia. So, when we finally obtained the sequence of their ...

Ancient protein and DNA analysis has now linked the Harbin skull, better known as Dragon Man, to the Denisovans. The massive cranium was first discovered in China in 1933, hidden for decades, and only ...

This finger bone discovered in Siberia in 2008 led to the original Denisovan discovery. Wikimedia, CC BY-SA It started with a finger bone found in a cave in the Altai mountains in Siberia in the late ...