A single, humanlike molar found inside a cave in Laos is the first fossil evidence of Denisovans in Southeast Asia.
In 2018, a child living in the village of Long Gua Pa in northeastern Laos approached a team of archaeologists, eager to show them a cave full of bones. The team began to chisel into the cave’s cementlike walls, exposing the remains of ancient rhinoceroses, tapirs, pigs, rodents—and a single, humanlike molar. Now, the researchers have identified the tooth as that of a Denisovan, mysterious cousins of Neanderthals and modern humans who likely died out about 30,000 years ago.
Denisovans coexisted in Eurasia with Neanderthals beginning hundreds of thousands of years ago, and later with anatomically modernas well. Although traces of their DNA live on in several modern populations—most notably in one group of Indigenous Filipinos who—fossil evidence of their existence has been hard to come by.
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