Mysterious Denisovans are said to have lived on the Tibetan Plateau for thousands of years
The analysis of thousands of bones discovered in the karst cave of Baishiya, a Buddhist sanctuary and paleoanthropological site in the north-east of the Tibetan plateau at an altitude of 3,800 metres, allows us to learn a little more about the Denisovans.
This species of hominins now extinct was only identified in 2010 from DNA extracted from a tooth and a bone found in the Siberian Denisova Cave. To date, only these two sites, in Siberia and Tibet, have identified the presence of Denisovans, meaning that very little is known about these distant cousins whose genetic heritage is close to both Neanderthals and Sapiens, and who would have lived in Asia.
The thousands of bones in the Tibetan cave belong mainly to goats – including yaks and goats – as well as birds, small rodents and even hyenas. But one of them, a human rib, is one of the few Denisovan remains ever discovered. “Even more interesting, underlines Science, It would seem, given its relatively short age – between 48,000 and 32,000 years old – that its owner may have come across some of our own ancestors.”
This discovery, described in Nature July 3rd, “brings a new
