The figure below is from Dediu and Levinson (2018). The dates are controversial, and there's no consensus on whether the Denisovans and Neanderthals are separate species.
Denisovan fossils are mostly found in China and the rest of East Asia, and most Neanderthal fossils are in Europe. Little bits of DNA have been recovered from Denisovans and Neanderthals, and markers specific to each group have been identified. They have been used to infer introgressions into the various other groups, including us (Homo sapiens). They are shown as red lines in the figure.
Proteins are more stable than DNA, and lately there have been new techniques developed to identify peptides from fossils. These analyses were applied to a collection of fossils from China called the Xujiayao assemblage in order to confirm that they belong to the Denisovan group. The features of these fossils were analyzed in detail in order to reconstruct what these cousins of ours must have looked like (Xing et al., 2026). The picture above is from a Nature news article (Fieldhouse, 2026).
Such images are quite speculative, but they are not completely imaginary. The Denisovans share some features with Neanderthals, as expected, but they also show a resemblance to the features of Homo erectus.
1. Denisovans is pronounced "deh-NEE-suh-vanz" with the emphasis on the second syllable.
Dediu, D. and Levinson, S.C. (2018) Neanderthal language revisited: not only us. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 21: 49-55. [doi: 10.1016/j.cobeha.2018.01.001]Fieldhouse, R. (2026) This is what the mysterious Denisovans looked like. Nature 658: 1111-1112. [doi: 10.1038/d41586-026-03360-0]
Xing, S., Wu, Z., Shao, Q., Ge, J., Bennett, E.A., Rao, H., Lin, S., Zhao, Y., Liu, F., Liu, Y., Zhou, K., Feng, X., Jiangzuo, Q. and Fu, Q. (2026) The proteome of Middle Pleistocene Xujiayao and common Denisovan morphology. Nature (published online 21 October 2026). [doi: 10.1038/s41586-026-11132-z]
Fascinating. Thank you. One query the figure doesn't seem to be in Zeberg 2024. Unless I am mistaken.
ReplyDelete@Neil Taylor: Thanks, I fixed the reference.
ReplyDeleteI don't know why it should be still controversial whether Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans were separate species. Since it is accepted that there was gene flow between all 3, then that should indicate that we are one species.
ReplyDeleteCertainly opinion is shifting towards their being the same species. But since "species" is, like many biological concepts, an idealization of what we actually see in nature, there is some fuzziness and some room for arbitrary opinions.
ReplyDeleteSome degree of introgression doesn't prevent there being different species. If it did, we would have to recognize only one species of duck.
ReplyDelete