A while back I made a post about Neanderthals, a species of extinct humans. Since then, I have received suggestions to also cover the Denisovans, which are another extinct species of humans.
The first fossil from the Denisovan species was found in 2008. This is when Russian paleoanthropologists found a small fragment of a finger bone. At that time it was determined that it was from a girl that lived about 40,000 years old, but it wasn’t until 2010 that a group of scientists at the Max Planck Society sequenced her genome. Her genome showed researchers that she was neither neanderthal nor a Homosapien but rather a new species. They named the new species Denosovians because of the cave in which she was discovered.
Another Denosovian fossil found in Xiahe, China, was a lower jaw. This fossil showed that the Denosovians had adaptations to high altitudes and seasonally temperatures. This is important because it gives evidence that the Denosovians share a common ancestor with the Neanderthals.
Larsen, Clark Spencer. Essentials of Biological Anthropology. W.W. Norton & Company, 2022.
“Denisovans: Face of Long-Lost Human Relative Unveiled.” BBC News, BBC, 19 Sept. 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-49760240.
Evolutionary Anthropology 