What Did Ancient Denisovans Look Like?

And why did they have 1975 grooming standards?

Back in 1933, a Chinaman working for the Japanese invaders dug up a funny looking skull. Recalling the excitement over the recent Peking Man findings, he didn’t want to have his find confiscated by the Japanese occupiers, so he buried the old skull in a well. After the the Japanese were defeated, he didn’t feel like talking about his past working for the Japs. So, he left the skull at the bottom of the well and only told his descendants. Finally, the family dug it up in 2018 and gave it to a Chinese university.

They dated it to at least 146,000 years ago. They found enough ancient DNA to determine it was another example of a Denisovan, a mystery human species or race or whatever first discovered in 2011 from a single pinkie finger. Most people east of about the Urals have some DNA descended from Denisovans, with New Guineans getting up to about 5% Denisovan ancestry.

Now, we finally had a Denisovan skull: So here’s the first artist's conception of a Denisovan:

So, now we know: Denisovans looked like roadies with a mid-1970s English metal band heavily inspired by "Lord of the Rings," or a darker version of Welsh actor John Rhys-Davies playing Gimli.

Or maybe Derek Smalls:

This Denisovan had a brain about 7% larger than the average modern human. Were they smarter? If so, how come we aren’t 95% Denisovan.

From the New York Times science section:

… John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the studies delivered a definitive answer to the question of the Harbin skull’s identity. “Mystery solved,” he said.

The DNA in the Harbin plaque also allowed Dr. Fu and her colleagues to place the Harbin skull on a Denisovan family tree. Modern humans share a common ancestor with both Neanderthals and Denisovans that lived in Africa about 600,000 years ago. The forerunners of Neanderthals and Denisovans migrated out of Africa and then split into the two lineages about 400,000 years ago.

Neanderthals spread from the Middle East to Western Europe, while Denisovans spread from Siberia eastward. Over thousands of generations, the Denisovans split into new branches.

Dr. Fu and her colleagues found that the Harbin skull belonged to the same branch as the oldest Denisovans found in the Denisova cave, whose fossils dated back about 200,000 years. A separate branch gave rise to the 66,000-year-old Denisovan girl whose pinkie bone was found there.

Given all the genetic diversity documented in Denisovan DNA, Dr. Fu can’t say whether the Harbin skull reveals a typical Denisovan face. “For now, it’s just one case,” she said. …

And the usual lumper-splitter debates have broken out:

For now, the discovery leaves scientists divided about what to call the lineage that includes the Harbin skull and the girl from Denisova. “Homo longi is the appropriate species name for this group,” said Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London who was not involved in the study.

But Dr. Hawks still calls them Denisovans. The fact that they could interbreed with our own ancestors, he argues, makes them a lineage in our own species, along with Neanderthals.

“I’m pretty confident saying these are all Homo sapiens,” he said.

Weirdly, few true believers in the Race Does Not Exist conventional wisdom use the same talking points to argue that Species Does Not Exist.

By the way, although most of our photos of Charles Darwin depict him as an long-bearded sage in advanced age, in this photo from middle age, Chuck looks like Keith Richards’ bruiser bodyguard.