An enigmatic fossil belonging to a once-unknown hominin that walked the Earth alongside early modern humans in Southeast Asia has now been identified.
Discovered in 2015, Penghu 1 is a fossil jawbone found by fishermen on the seabed of the Penghu Channel off Taiwan’s coast. Estimates of the curious fossil’s age, which possesses some characteristics similar to Neanderthals, gauged it between 19,000 and 10,000 years old, making it the oldest hominin fossil recovered in the region.
If correct, the fossil’s age presented an intriguing mystery. If the last Neanderthals known to exist were believed to have died out around 40,000 years ago along Europe’s Iberian Peninsula, what could the mysterious Penghu 1 fossil represent?
One intriguing possibility had been that the curious fossil might have belonged to a Denisovan, another extinct species of robust hominins that existed alongside early anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals in parts of Siberia and Asia. However, Penghu 1 featured several distinctive morphological features that made any conclusive taxonomic classification difficult. Further complicating the situation was that early attempts to extract ancient DNA were unsuccessful.
Now, scientists say the first and oldest hominin fossil discovered in Taiwan has been successfully identified as a male Denisovan. The discovery was made possible by successfully extracting and sequencing bone and tooth proteins from the specimen.
The new findings reveal that Denisovans possessed much stronger jaws than previously recognized by paleoanthropologists. This extends the geographic range of this lost ancient species further into Southeast Asia, where they likely interbred with ancient humans before mysteriously vanishing, potentially as recently as the early Holocene.
An international team of researchers from Japan, Taiwan, and Denmark successfully sequenced bone and tooth proteins from Penghu 1, offering new insights into humans’ evolutionary history in eastern Asia.
Past studies have shown that modern Southeast Asian human populations possess genomic elements that reveal Denisovan ancestry. Despite what genetic studies had revealed about the likely interbreeding between humans and Denisovans in the region, until now, fossil remains of these ancient human cousins were fragmentary and had primarily only been recovered from a pair of sites in northern Asia—one being Denisova cave, from which the species draws its name.
With the successful identification of Penghu 1 as a male Denisovan, the once-mysterious fossil now helps scientists extend the range of this enigmatic group of early humans while offering unprecedented insights into the morphology of a nearly complete Denisovan mandible.
Intriguingly, the Penghu 1 fossil now shows that Denisovans possessed much more robust jaws and teeth than not just Homo sapiens, but also Neanderthals. This feature might indicate this species possessed other, more noticeably archaic human characteristics than their hominin cousins with whom they shared the Earth during the late Pleistocene and, in the case of early modern humans, the early Holocene.
The discovery is detailed in a new paper, “A male Denisovan mandible from Pleistocene Taiwan,” which appeared in Science on April 10, 2025.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks.