Mysterious human relative roamed from Siberia to the Tropics, farther than thought

Although our advances in science have gone a long way, we’re still discovering exciting details about our ancestors and cousins, including the mysterious human relative, which researchers have now discovered had lived from Siberia to the Tropics.

Specifically, the extinct hominins called Denisovans seem to have adapted to a wide range of environments, judging by the DNA evidence that suggests they lived throughout East Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, according to a report published by Scientific American on April 10.

Interestingly, Denisovan remains are scarce, and it was only recently that scientists discovered that a fossilized jawbone found in the shallow Penghu Channel off the coast of Taiwan almost 20 years ago by a commercial fishing dredge belonged to a male specimen, making it only the third location so far to yield verifiable remnants.

The mysterious human relative joins the family

In fact, researchers didn’t even know Denisovans existed until 15 years ago when they realized that a finger bone, and later some other bone fragments and teeth, unearthed in Denisova Cave in southern Siberia belonged to a previously entirely unknown hominin.

One decade later, scientists linked a mandible with two molars, discovered by a Buddhist monk in a Tibetan cave in 1980, to the same cryptic lineage. According to Frido Welker, a molecular anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen and a co-author of the new jawbone study:

“That’s very little to go on, [and] every piece that is informative changes our picture.”

Indeed, the fossils from Siberia and Tibet gave evidence that Denisovans started wandering across the Eurasian continent at least 200 millennia ago and survived long enough to interbreed with anatomically modern humans as the latter spread out of Africa about 50,000 years ago. 

And now, with the newest discovery, Welker’s team has revealed that not only these human cousins were able to survive the harsh Siberian winter and the Tibetan Plateau heights, but that they also roamed in the warm, humid climate of low-latitude East Asia. 

Mastering such diverse environments is something that no other hominin group – not even the robust Neanderthals – had accomplished. According to Bence Viola, a University of Toronto paleoanthropologist who wasn’t involved with the study:

“This shows that they were extraordinarily adaptive.”

Meanwhile, in terms of our closer ancestry, new DNA evidence has shown that Stone Age Europeans sailed across the Mediterranean Sea, navigating its waters between Europe and North Africa in wooden vessels over 8,000 years ago, despite popular belief that humans of that time weren’t keen on sailing.