A jawbone shows Denisovans lived on the Tibetan Plateau long before humans
All previously known fossils from the mysterious hominids come from a Siberian cave
By Bruce Bower
Denisovans reached what’s now called “the roof of the world” at least 160,000 years ago.
Found in a Tibetan Plateau cave, a partial lower jawbone represents a Denisovan who is the oldest known hominid to reach the region’s cloud-scraping heights, researchers report online May 1 in Nature.
The fossil suggests that these perplexing, extinct members of the human lineage weathered the plateau’s frigid, thin air long before humans did. Many researchers have assumed that, as far as hominids go, only Homo sapiens settled in that high-altitude, low-oxygen environment, probably no earlier than 40,000 years ago (SN: 12/22/18, p. 6).