The Denisovans are a group of ancient humans first identified in 2008, when a fingertip from a child, between 30,000 and 60,000 years old, was discovered in Denisova cave in Siberia. A team led by Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute in Germany extracted DNA from the bone and found it was neither Neanderthal nor Homo sapiens. Only 12 small fragments of Denisovan remains have been found. Traces of Denisovan DNA appear in modern people, particularly across Asia.
In 1933, during the Japanese invasion of northern China, a man found a large ancient cranium embedded in the muddy bank of the Songhua river near the city of Harbin. He hid it in a well. It was not until his deathbed that he told his grandchildren; they later donated it to the Geoscience Museum of Hebei.
The skull, more than 146,000 years old, has a large brain case reminiscent of sapiens, but features such as its prominent eyebrow ridges do not fit the look of modern humans. In 2021 a team led by Ni Xijun, a palaeoanthropologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), proposed a new species: Homo longi, or "Dragon Man."
In 2024 Fu Qiaomei, a molecular geneticist also at CAS, confirmed that the skull belonged to a Denisovan. She found ancient proteins and mitochondrial DNA in the plaque on its teeth that matched a Denisovan profile. The result also vindicated the Chinese fossil record, a collection of hominin fossils long considered of little evolutionary importance by many in the West but now seen with new eyes. Christopher Bae, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and Wu Xiujie from CAS had in 2024 proposed that some Chinese skulls, including the Harbin cranium, belonged to a new species they called Homo juluensis ("Big-Headed People").
Nuclear genomes from Denisovans show that they and Neanderthals formed a single lineage—sometimes called the "Neandersovans"—which split from modern humans before splitting from each other. A high-quality genome from a Denisovan tooth, produced by Janet Kelso's team (a colleague of Pääbo), reinforced this picture. By this account, the sapiens lineage diverged from the Neandersovans between 500,000 and 800,000 years ago. The Neandersovans spread out of Africa to Eurasia; ancestors of the Neanderthals moved westward into Europe and ancestors of the Denisovans went east to Asia.
But the physical appearance of the Harbin skull tells a different story. Ni Xijun and Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum in Britain argue that longi split from sapiens only after Neanderthals went their own way—implying the ancestors of sapiens and longi remained one group and probably lived in Europe or west Asia more than a million years ago. They base this partly on a reconstruction of a one-million-year-old crushed Chinese skull called Yunxian 2, published in September 2024 in Science. The implication would be that the origin of the sapiens lineage arose outside Africa, flipping everything palaeontologists think they know about human origins.
According to Kelso's genome, at least three separate Denisovan groups interbred with sapiens coming from Africa some 60,000 years ago. The ancestors of modern Oceanians, including indigenous Australians, came first; the ancestors of modern east and south Asians came later.
John Hawks, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has proposed a resolution: if Denisovans interbred with Asian Homo erectus-like humans who were still around when they arrived, that could have made the resulting Denisovans look older than they actually were. A 2020 paper also found evidence that Denisovans interbred with a very old "superarchaic" lineage that had split from their own ancestors more than 1.2m years earlier.
This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force.