THE human story only becomes more intricate and fascinating. For hundreds of thousands of years, a mysterious group known as the Denisovans lived in the east of Asia – even as our species was emerging in Africa and beginning to spread around the world. Their homeland spanned thousands of kilometres and they existed as a group longer than we have as a species. Yet they were utterly unknown until 2010, when they were identified from DNA preserved in a bone fragment.
A decade later, the Denisovans remain enigmatic. We know they were a sister group to the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and west Asia around the same time, and that they interbred with Neanderthals and with us. But only a handful of bones have been identified and we don’t have a complete skull, so it is impossible to reliably imagine what they looked like.
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If we cannot know their appearance, can we at least guess at their minds? We now have evidence that they survived in the extreme environment of the Tibetan plateau, long before modern humans attempted it. Furthermore, in recent years, archaeologists have found tools and other artefacts that may have been made by the Denisovans (see “The other humans: The emerging story of the mysterious Denisovans”). The provenance of the more impressive objects is hotly disputed, but it seems that many of the tools really were made by this group.
“For millennia, our species seems to have advanced in lockstep with the Denisovans”
On the evidence so far, the Denisovans may have been creating the same sort of tools that Neanderthals, and our species, made at the same time. For millennia, the three groups seem to have advanced in lockstep. Only in the past few tens of thousands of years, long after our species’ origin, did our ancestors start producing complex objects and art that surpassed that of the Denisovans and Neanderthals.
It is tempting to imagine that our species evolved greater intelligence at that time. But maybe it was simply that our population swelled, so the various groups needed ways to demonstrate their identities – and harnessed latent talents to do so. In that case, perhaps a small twist of fate would have been enough to lead the Denisovans to make these cultural breakthroughs first, and it would be us, not them, almost lost in the mists of time.
