Discovery of the Denisovans and archaic-modern interbreeding

Date

c. 100,000 – 40,000 years ago (interbreeding); identified 2010

Category

Science, technology & invention

Region

Asia and Oceania (Siberia, Melanesia)

Era

Prehistory

Significance

In 2010 a team led by Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute sequenced DNA from a juvenile finger bone excavated in Denisova Cave in the Altai mountains of Siberia and found it belonged to a previously unknown group of archaic humans, named the Denisovans.

Remarkably, the Denisovans were first defined by their genome rather than by their bones, of which very few have been found. In the same period Pääbo's group published the first draft Neanderthal genome, revealing that people living outside Africa today carry roughly 1-4 percent Neanderthal DNA, a legacy of interbreeding as modern humans dispersed out of Africa. Denisovan ancestry, meanwhile, reaches its highest levels — around 4-6 percent — in present-day Melanesians and other peoples of New Guinea and Australia, with smaller traces across Asia. Some of this inherited archaic DNA is functional: a Denisovan version of the EPAS1 gene helps modern Tibetans tolerate the low oxygen of high altitude. These discoveries, recognised with the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, transformed the human story from a simple replacement narrative into one of repeated mixing among coexisting human populations.

Related science, technology & invention events

• Homo floresiensis, the 'Hobbit' of Flores
  c. 100,000 – 50,000 years ago
• Australopithecus afarensis ('Lucy' and relatives)
  c. 3.9–2.9 million years ago
• Domestication of maize from teosinte in Mesoamerica
  c. 7000 BCE (c. 9,000 years ago)
• Domestication of rice in the Yangtze River basin
  c. 8000–6000 BCE
• Domestication of the dog, humanity's first domesticated animal
  c. 16,000 – 14,000 years ago
• Earliest Controlled Use of Fire by Homo erectus
  c. 1,000,000 BCE

Also relevant

• The Mousterian industry and the Levallois technique
  c. 300,000 – 40,000 years ago
• The robust australopithecines (Paranthropus): a specialised chewing lineage
  c. 2.7–1.2 million years ago
• The Schöningen spears: the oldest wooden hunting weapons
  c. 300,000 years ago

Further reading

A Little History of Science

The wider story

A Little History of Science

William Bynum

Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.

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