Denisova Cave

But the population center was probably Southern China.

I think Denisova Cave itself is actually just a outlier, you know, a small foraging group that ended up, you know, in Denisova Cave.

It's not like that was the population center for all of the Denisovans, and then they moved so- They were probably in the central part of China, southern part of China, um, and where you had a lot of dispersals moving outward from there.

And then one ended up in Denisova, one ended up, you know, in Jiahu, in the, in the high altitudes, right? But, um, these are really, like, outliers compared to, uh, the, the core.

We call them ghost populations, and they're forcing us to completely reimagine what it meant to be human.

The revolution began in two thousand and eight in the most unlikely place imaginable, a cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, a place called Denisova Cave.

Russian archeologists had been working there for years, finding stone tools and animal bones.

Nothing extraordinary.

We barely have any fossils.

The first Denisovan remains were discovered in 2010 in Denisova Cave in Siberia.

A single finger bone and a couple of teeth.

That's it.

This means our ancestors didn't just encounter Neanderthals, they mated with them, produced viable offspring who survived and reproduced and passed on Neanderthal genes that are still with us today.

The interbreeding wasn't just between modern humans and Neanderthals.

In twenty eighteen, researchers analyzed a bone fragment from Denisova Cave and discovered it belonged to a teenage girl whose mother was Neanderthal and father was Denisovan.

This wasn't just interbreeding.

Uh, my husband, Ed Green, was part of Svante Pääbo's group when they were assembling the Neanderthal genome, and so he spent a lot of time thinking about Neanderthal.

I think what's interesting from a species concept, w- if we start there, with what's going on with Neanderthals, is w- we now know based on studying DNA, both from Neanderthals that used to be alive and a different lineage of human called a Denisovan, we, we call it this, that was first isolated again by Svante Pääbo's research group from a tiny little finger bone that they found in a cave, Denisova Cave in Russia, that's why they're called Denisovans.

We know that there were multiple different species or lineages or whatever you want to call them of human-like people that were alive at the same time, and we know that after people moved out of Africa to colonize Europe, they met our ancestors, Homo sapiens, anatomically modern humans, everything you wanna call them, they met groups of Neanderthals, and they bred with them.

So if they were a different species, they were violating the biological species concept at this point.

So the Denisovans lived all across North Asia, Central Asia, whatever, and then all the way into Southeast Asia.

And we know from Denisova Cave, which you've probably heard of, that's where the Denisovans were originally discovered.

That seems to have been kind of the border range between Neanderthals and Denisovans because we see them both inhabiting this cave over successive generations.

And then you might even know that there's a human hybrid, first generation hybrid between Neanderthals and Denisovans at Denisovans Cave.

Let's stand at the mouth of this cave and understand why, of all the places on Earth, this particular hole in a mountainside became ground zero for one of the biggest discoveries in human evolutionary history.

Denisova Cave sits in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, close to where Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China all nearly touch each other.

Look at a map and you'll notice something interesting.

This isn't some random, isolated pocket of wilderness.

If you were a group of ancient humans trying to move from one region to another, trying to follow herds, find fresh water, escape a harsh winter, or just explore what lay beyond the next ridge the altai was exactly the kind of place your feet would eventually lead you that's the first thing worth understanding this cave wasn't chosen at random by whoever first sheltered inside it it sat along a route that different populations potentially separated by tens of thousands of years would have found independently useful for the exact same reasons good access to water reasonable protection from the brutal siberian winters proximity to hunting grounds In a sense, the cave was less a hidden secret and more a well-positioned rest stop, the kind of place that keeps attracting travellers century after century, millennium after millennium, simply because the geography makes sense.

Now, here's where it gets interesting.

When archaeologists began excavating inside Denisova Cave, they weren't just digging through a single layer of dirt with a single story to tell.

They were cutting through what's essentially a time capsule, one built in layers, like the pages of a book nobody had opened in tens of thousands of years.