A mystery that started with the discovery of a pinkie finger bone in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia may finally have been cracked.

Scientists used mtDNA to confirm what many researchers had long suspected: the Chinese “dragon man” Harbin skull belonged to ...

Humanity's closest relatives, both extinct, are the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. The second group, who lived alongside both humans and Neanderthals, were only discovered in 2008. They lived across ...

Even hardened tooth tartar can rewrite textbooks,” said evolutionary geneticist Qiaomei Fu, whose research team has just ...

A prominent brow ridge with a brain as large as modern humans and Neanderthals — that’s what the archaic human group, the Denisovans, looked like, according to work published this week in Cell and ...

Here are 10 major findings about human ancestors and our close ancient relatives that scientists announced in 2025. A handful ...

Many people around the world have more Denisovan DNA than previously thought, which has contributed to their sense of smell and ability to thrive at high altitudes, according to a study released ...

The human family tree has many twisting branches, and we don’t fully understand most of them. One of the most enigmatic are the Denisovans, who were only discovered in 2008 and have been described ...

Eighty-five years ago, a man working at a construction site discovered the skull in northeast China, which was occupied by Japan at the time. Instead of handing it over to Japanese scientists, he hid ...

We don’t know what the Denisovan looked like. We don’t know how it lived, what tools it used, how tall it was, what it ate, or if it buried its dead. But from only two teeth and a piece of finger bone ...

Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us? Using artificial intelligence, a number of European evolutionary biologists now ...

Anthropologists have just hit the genomic jackpot. Among the thousands of bone fragments excavated from an ancient cave in Siberia’s Altai mountains, scientists have identified an inch-long shard that ...