Denisovans are diverse: Jawbone in Taiwan (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, April 11, 2025, 20:15 (2 days ago) @ David Turell

From Tibet to Taiwan:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01090-3?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_cam...

"A fossilized jawbone found off the coast of Taiwan more than 20 years ago belonged to a group of ancient humans, called the Denisovans, first identified in a Siberian cave.

The finding, published today in Science1, is the result of time-consuming work to extract ancient proteins from the fossil. It also expands the known geographical range of the group, from colder, high-altitude regions to warmer climates.

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"The lower jawbone, with four teeth intact, is called Penghu 1 and was dredged up by fishing crews from the Penghu channel, 25 kilometres off the west coast of Taiwan. Penghu 1 was donated to Taiwan’s National Museum of Natural Science in Taichung after researchers recognized its significance as coming from an ancient human relative2. But the identity of that unknown relative remained a mystery, until now.

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"The team identified several degraded fragments, two of which bore specific amino-acid sequence variations matching those seen in the genetic sequences of a Denisovan finger bone3 found in the Denisova Cave in southern Siberia in 2008. The researchers could also tell that the jawbone came from a male Denisovan.

"It’s the second location that molecular evidence from ancient proteins has definitively linked fossil remains to the Denisovans. The first was in a cave in Xiahe, Tibet where proteins from a jawbone4 and then a rib bone were determined to be from Denisovans.

"Pinning down an exact age for the Penghu fossil is challenging because scientists do not have samples of the sediment it was buried in.

“'One can only say it’s older than 50,000” years, says Rainer Grün, a geochronologist at the Australian National University in Canberra, who dated the fossil in 2015 and subsequently reanalysed the data5.

"The Xiahe 1 mandible is at least 160,000 years old, and material from the Denisova cave indicates that Denisovans lived in Siberia between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago. At that time, sea levels were lower and the Chinese mainland was connected to Taiwan.

"Enrico Cappellini, a molecular biologist at the University of Copenhagen, says that the discovery of Denisovan remains further east than Tibet is not surprising. Modern-day human populations across the Pacific harbour Denisovan gene sequences from interbreeding between Denisovans and Homo sapiens. Indeed, one of the sequence variants that marked Penghu 1 as a Denisovan is present in more than 20% of the modern-day population of the Philippines.

"Kelso says that traces of Denisovan DNA found in modern-day human populations suggest that there were multiple populations of the ancient hominin. The latest data also show slight differences in protein sequences between the Taiwanese, Tibetan and Siberian Denisovan fossils."
Comment: Like sapiens Denisovans migrated all over.