The tooth was found at this site in Laos.
Among the first batch of fossils to come out of the cave was a small, underdeveloped hominin tooth. The collection was probably amassed by porcupines collecting bones to sharpen their teeth and extract nutrients, says Shackelford. These belonged to a mixture of species, including giant tapirs, deer, pigs and ancient relatives of modern elephants. But in 2018, Shackelford and her colleagues were looking for potential dig sites in northern Laos when they came across a cave “just filled with teeth”. That’s partially because fossils have a better chance of surviving in cold, dry conditions than in warm, humid ones. Aside from the latter, every specimen (including a piece of bone that belonged to a half-Denisovan girl whose mother was a Neanderthal) has come from Denisova cave. The entire fossil record for Denisovans so far boils down to a handful of teeth, bone shards and a jawbone found in Tibet. This suggests that the species ranged far beyond Siberia - but the fossil evidence has been sparse. Subsequent genetic studies 3, 4 have revealed that millions of people from Asia, Oceania and the Pacific Islands carry traces of Denisovan DNA.īiggest Denisovan fossil yet is the first found outside Siberian cave “This is one little piece of evidence that they were really there.” Expanded rangeĭenisovans were first identified in 2010, when scientists sequenced DNA from a fingertip bone found in Denisova cave in Siberia, and showed that it belonged to a previously unknown species of ancient human 2. “We’ve always assumed that Denisovans were in this part of the world, but we’ve never had the physical evidence,” says study co-author Laura Shackelford, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Its presence in Laos supports the idea that the species had a much broader geographic range than the fossil record previously indicated. The molar, described in Nature Communications on 17 May 1, is only the second Denisovan fossil to be found outside Siberia. If confirmed, it would be the first fossil evidence that Denisovans - an extinct hominin species that co-existed with Neanderthals and modern humans - lived in southeast Asia. DemeterĪ fossilized tooth unearthed in a cave in northern Laos might have belonged to a young Denisovan girl that died between 164,000 and 131,000 years ago. The fossilized molar, seen here from several angles, is thought to have belonged to a young Denisovan girl that died between 164,000 and 131,000 years ago.
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