For the past 40,000 years, Homo sapiens have been the only human species on Earth. Our ancestors, including the Neanderthals and Denisovans, disappeared long before us, leaving behind only fossils and ...

Human evolution’s biggest mystery, which emerged 15 years ago from a 60,000-year-old pinkie finger bone, finally started to unravel in 2025. Analysis of DNA extracted from the fossil electrified the ...

A prominent brow ridge with a brain as large as modern humans and Neanderthals — that’s what the archaic human group, the Denisovans, looked like, according to work published this week in Cell 1 and ...

Fifteen years after the discovery of a new type of human, the Denisovan, scientists discovered its DNA in a fossilized skull. The key? Tooth plaque. By Carl Zimmer When Qiaomei Fu discovered a new ...

A 146,000-year-old skull from Harbin, China, belongs to a Denisovan, according to a recent study of proteins preserved inside the ancient bone. The paleoanthropologists who studied the Harbin skull in ...

During the Japanese invasion of northern China in 1933, a man was hired to build a bridge across the Songhua river near the city of Harbin. As he was digging, he found a large, ancient cranium ...