Denisovan Remains May Be Younger Than First Believed

Not long ago, we were finally able to find decent sized bones that proteins provided proteomic evidence (rather than DNA evidence which was not available) were able to match to Denisovans, which were found on the coast of the main island of Taiwan, finally putting a body together with the ghost population implied by DNA evidence. Two more leg bones were recently found.

Earlier dating had suggested an age for the Taiwanese Denisovan remains of about 160,000 years ago, long before modern humans arrived in the region and overlapping with Homo erectus. Analysis of the new leg bones by a more reliable and credible method, however, reveals that they are actually just 45,000 years old, contemporaneous with a modern human presence in the region.

At one level this isn't a surprise. Modern humans in Southeast and East Asia and Oceania have genetic admixture from Denisovans, so they had to overlap at some point. But it is surprising that the two different dating methods differed from each other by a factor of four.

The chemical analysis also suggests that these Denisovans, like Neanderthals, had a diet heavy in meat from large mammals.

My link is to a blog post by John Hawks who cites his sources:

* Chang, Chun-Hsiang, et al., "The first archaic Homo from Taiwan." 6 Nature Communications 6037 (2015). doi:10.1038/ncomms7037

* Grün, R. & Stringer, C., "Direct dating of human fossils and the ever-changing story of human evolution." 322 Quaternary Science Reviews 108379 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2023.108379

* Kaifu, Y., Chang, et al., "Denisovan leg bones from Taiwan reveal large body size." bioRxiv (2026). https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.08.07.743438

* Tsutaya, et al., "A male Denisovan mandible from Pleistocene Taiwan." 388(6743) Science 176–180 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ads3888

* Yoneda, et al., "Habitat and feeding ecology of a Denisovan from Late Pleistocene Taiwan." bioRxiv (2026). https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.08.07.743455

* Zhang, D., et al., "Denisovan DNA in Late Pleistocene sediments from Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau." 370(6516) Science 584–587 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abb6320