Jaw of Denisovan, prehistoric human "cousin", discovered in Tibet

TO CLOSE

It seems that our ancestors crossed with another close relative, not once, but twice.
Buzz60

The jaw that the monk discovered several decades ago was not that of a donkey. Instead, the 160,000-year-old fossil came from a Denisovan, a mysterious sister group long extinguished by Neanderthals, itself a separate group of archaic humans.

In a new study released Wednesday, paleontologists said that the jawbone is the oldest fossil of Denisovan ever discovered in Tibet.

While this fossil was discovered at nearly 11,000 feet above sea level, all previous fossils of these human-like creatures had been found relatively close to sea level in Siberia.

The study reveals intriguing details about the geographical distribution of Denisovans, their physical appearance and their unexpected ability to conquer extreme environments, according to Reuters.

"It's a big surprise" that a family member can live in the cold climate and tunes of the Tibetan plateau at that time, more than 100,000 years before the arrival of our own species said co-author of the study, Jean-Jacques Hublin, to the press. Hublin is a conference call from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

A virtual reconstruction of the jaw of the Denisovan fossil discovered in Tibet. (Photo: Jean-Jacques Hublin, MPI-EVA, Leipzig)

The species "is successfully adapted to high altitude, oxygen-poor environments well before the regional arrival of modern Homo sapiens," the study says.

"It must have been really hard to live there as a hunter-gatherer, and they still managed to be there," he said. The anthropologist Frido Welker of the University of Copenhagen, one of the researchers of the study, according to Reuters.

The jawbone had been discovered in 1980 by a Buddhist monk, but it took several decades to reach scientists from Lanzhou University in China.

A protein analysis led the scientists to conclude that this was from a Denisovan.

Other experts not affiliated with the study agreed that the fossil could help identify other remains under the name of Denisovan. "We have always assumed … that Denisovans were distributed throughout Asia," said Bence Viola of the University of Toronto.

Dr. Dongju Zhang from Lanzhou University, available in April 2019, shows a photo of the Jiangla Valley in Gansu Province of China. According to a report released on Wednesday, May 1, 2019, a jaw fragment found in the region would be at least 160,000 years old and recovered proteins allowed scientists to conclude that it came from a Denisovan, a relative of Neanderthal. (Photo: Dongju Zhang / Lanzhou University via AP)

Katerina Harvati of the University of Tuebingen in Germany said the Denisovans' ability to adapt to the inhospitable climate of the Tibetan Plateau is remarkable. This adds to the growing evidence that our former parents were more capable than scientists thought, she said.