When Qiaomei Fu discovered a new kind of person 15 years ago, she had no idea what it looked like. There was only a fragment of a pinkbot to continue.
The fossil chip, found in a Siberian cave called Denisova, looked like it could be of a 66,000 year old family member of today’s people, or perhaps a Neanderthal. But Dr. FU, then a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and her colleagues found DNA in the fossil that told another story. The bone was from a girl who was part of a third human origin that had never been seen before. They called her people the Denisovans.
In the following years Dr. Fu helped to discover more Denisovan DNA: in teeth and bone fragments from the Denisova -cave, in the sediment of a cave floor in Tibet and even in people who live today in Asia and the Pacific Ocean – proof of crosses from decades ago.
But without indications from a skeleton or a skull, the physical appearance of these people remained a mystery, Dr. Fu, now a geneticist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. “After 15 years, people want to know, who are the Denisovans?”
It’s all the more special because the skull Was almost lost of science. In 1933 a worker in the city of Harbin, China, discovered it on a construction site and suspected that it was valuable, hid it in an abandoned well. But he never returned to pick it up and only breathed a word of it shortly before his death. He told his family about the skull, and they fished it out of the well in 2018 and donated it to the Heei Geo University.
There, Qiang Ji, a paleoanthropologist, and other scientists analyzed the chemistry of the fossil and concluded that it dates out At least 146,000 years – Maybe much longer.
After reconstructing the face of the Harbin skull, the scientists concluded that it was a huge man with flat cheeks, a broad mouth and no chin. An impressive eyebrows hung over his deep eyes and spherical nose. And within his massive skull there was a huge brain, with about 7 percent larger than the average brain of a living person.
Dr. Ji and his colleagues concluded that the Harbin skull, with all its distinctive features, belonged to its own kind. In 2021 they mentioned the species Gay longiFor Lange Jiang, the region where the skull was found.
But some scientists, including Dr. Fu, wondered if it was a denisovan. To find out, she was allowed to study the Harbin skull. She had spent years inspecting skulls and other fossils in Chinese museums on Denisovan DNA, but was empty every time.
To test the Harbin skull, Dr. Fu and her colleagues small monsters from a tooth and out of the bone that the inner ear houses – usually the best places in a skull to look for genetic material.
They didn’t find old DNA. But the bone contained 95 proteins, a huge number for an old fossil and enough to determine what it was: a Denisovan.
No matter how exciting that discovery was, Dr. Fu, their failure to find DNA “was still painful.” DNA is more complex than proteins, with the potential to reveal more secrets about the fossils where it comes from.
So Dr. Fu decided to search again for DNA, this time in the plaque on the teeth of the Harbin skull. While Plaque accumulates, the bacteria runs up and sometimes also a few cells from the mouth. She knew it was a long recording, but thought it was worth trying.
Then Dr. Fu and her colleagues inspected a monster of the plaque, they discovered DNA. As expected, most came from bacteria. But a small group came from the cells of the mouth. And when they analyzed that DNA, they discovered that it was Denisovan.
Janet Kelso, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute that was not involved in the study, said the discovery was remarkable, because fossilized plaque miniscule quantities of DNA at its best.
“It is fascinating that the hardened plaque layer has kept enough of the DNA of the Harbin individual for them to successfully determine that the individual was Denisovan,” she said.
John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the studies gave a definitive answer to the matter of the identity of the Harbin Skull. “Mystery resolved,” he said.
The DNA in the Harbin plaquette left Dr. FU and her colleagues also to place the Harbin skull on a Denisovan tree tree. Modern people share a common ancestor with both Neanderthals and Denisovans who lived in Africa about 600,000 years ago. The precursors of Neanderthalers and Denisovans migrated from Africa and then split into the two lines about 400,000 years ago.
Neanderthalers spread from the middle -old to Western Europe, while Denisovans spread eastwards from Siberia. More than thousands of generations, the Denisovans split into new branches.
Dr. FU and her colleagues discovered that the Harbin skull belonged to the same branch as the oldest Denisovans in the Denisova -cave, whose fossils date around 200,000 years. A separate branch gave rise to the 66,000-year-old Denisovan girl whose pinkbot was found there.
Given all the genetic diversity documented in Denisovan DNA, Dr. Fu do not say whether the Harbin Skull reveals a typical Denisovan face. “For now it’s just one thing,” she said.
She hopes to inspect more fossils that have been found in China and other parts of Asia to look for Denisovan DNA and proteins. “If we can get extra skulls in the future, we can understand what the mean Denisovans looked like,” she said.
For now, the discovery leaves scientists spread over what they should call the origin that the Harbin skull and the girl from Denisova include. “Homo Longi is the right species name for this group,” said Chris Stinger, a Paleoanthropologist in the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study.
But Dr. Hawks still calls them Denisovans. The fact that they could cross our own ancestors, he says, makes them a origin in our own kind, together with Neanderthals.
“I am pretty sure that these are all gay sapiens,” he said.
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