This is the first ever confirmed skull of a Denisovan
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Diverging Reports Breakdown
This is the first ever confirmed skull of a Denisovan
Researchers find DNA in the dental plaque on a Denisovan skull. The skull contains 27 gene variants only found in the seven known Denisovan individuals. The researchers say they are confident the skull is that of a Denisovan. The study was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of London. It is the latest in a series of studies on the Denisovans and Neanderthals that are changing our understanding of our own evolution and the role they played in our history. The research was funded by the European Commission.
Yet Fu still wanted to find DNA to confirm if the skull belonged to a Denisovan. And so she looked in the dental plaque on its single remaining tooth. It was a long shot: while plaque is a very hardy material, researchers more typically find bacterial DNA in it. It’s rarer to find the DNA of the owner of the teeth. Against expectations, she did find a tiny amount of DNA there that was human and looked sufficiently old to have belonged to the skull itself, and not one of the people who have handled it since.
“They may have actually recovered many DNA fragments from me because I studied and handled the specimens so many times,” says paleoanthropologist Xijun Ni, who is based at the same institute and was one of the coauthors of the paper proposing Homo longi as a new species, but was not a coauthor on the current paper. (He is not convinced that the protein analysis is sufficiently specific, nor does he believe the degraded DNA is enough to identify the specimen as Denisovan.)
Fu acknowledges in the paper “a substantial proportion” of the DNA she found was clearly the result of contamination. But using the established protocols to select only the DNA that is indeed ancient, she found that the tiny amount of DNA that remains, like the proteins, confidently identifies the skull as Denisovan “It contains 27 gene variants only found in the seven known Denisovan individuals,” says Fu. “None of these can arise from modern human contamination.”
“The data are quite convincing,” says paleobiologist Frido Welker of the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who specializes in the analysis of ancient proteins, but wasn’t involved in this study. “The Harbin cranium appears to be a Denisovan.”
Other researchers are convinced as well. Since the description of [the Harbin skull] I was hopeful that we finally had a face for the Denisovans, and these papers prove it,” says Viola who has conducted excavations in Denisova cave. “It’s great that two different methods gave us the same result, this makes me much more confident that this is real.”