Denisovans are the first group of ancient extinct archaic humans to have been discovered based on their DNA alone, even though this happened by accident. In 2008 research was done in the Denisova cave by archaeologists from the Russian academy of Sciences during their investigation they discovered a finger bone from a teenage female hominin that was thought to have lived somewhere between 50.000 and 30.000 years ago. In total we have fossils belonging to 6 different distinct Denisovan individuals that were found in the Denisova Cave. These individuals have been identified through their DNA, and they are known as; Denisova 2, Denisova 3 who is also known as X Woman, Denisova 4, Denisova 8, Denisova 11 and Denisova 13. Denisova 11, or otherwise known as Denny, is of significance for a very different reason, the fossil belonging to her body was discovered in 2012. The fossil is a piece of either an arm or a leg bone and this was another adolescent female, approximately 13 years of age and she lived approximately 90.000 years ago. This is the only Denisovan and Neanderthal hybrid that we know of at this point in time. She is a 1st Generation archaic hybrid, research has uncovered that she had a Neanderthal Mother and a Denisovan Father. All Denisovan fossils came from this one location, the Denisova Cave in Siberia and their DNA was discovered to be carried by many people in Asia, Indonesia and all the way down south to Australia. But in 2019 a research group in China discovered that a partial mandible found in the Baishiya Cave on the Tibetan Plateau in China belonged to a Denisovan. They were not able to extract DNA from this bone, but they were able to do an ancient protein analysis that contained collagen and found this specimen had closes affiliation to the Denisovans from the Denisova Cave. The researchers discovered that the Mitochondrial DNA of Denisovans differ on 385 of the 16.500 bases, or nucleotides, with Modern Humans. To put this in perspective a bit, modern human and Neanderthals only differ on 202 of the 16.500 nucleotides. But this wasn’t the only type of DNA research that was done on the Denisovans, aside from the Mitochondrial DNA they also did Nuclear DNA testing and through that the researchers discovered that the Denisovans and Neanderthals were much more closely related to each other than both of them were related to modern humans. So what do we know about what Denisovans looked like? Well, as you can imagine there is little known about the Anatomy of the Denisovans, because we only have a small amount of physical remains and the ones that we do have are either small in size or teeth and therefore not indicative of their appearance. #Denisovans #NeanderthalDenisovanHybrid #DenisovanDNA Music: Adrian von Ziegler Thumbnail pic ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82VH1ZW3Guc