A mystery that started with the discovery of a pinkie finger bone in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia may finally have been cracked.

The Denisovans, together with the Neanderthals, are the closest extinct relatives of modern humans. It wasn't until 2010 that scientists announced that the Denisovans existed, so much about them ...

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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 ...

DNA has shown that the extinct humans thrived around the world, from chilly Siberia to high-altitude Tibet — perhaps even in the Pacific islands. By Carl Zimmer Leer en español Neanderthals may have ...

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 ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from ...

During the Japanese invasion of northern China in 1933, a man was hired to build a bridge across the Songhua river near the city of Harbin. As he was digging, he found a large, ancient cranium ...