The first Denisovan radius ever discovered is offering scientists a rare new glimpse into one of humanity’s most mysterious ancient relatives, whose scarce fossil remains have left much of their story unknown.
In a recent paper published in Nature, the team described these unique remains, discovered in the Bianfu Cave in Southwest China, an important Paleolithic site.
While Denisovans have been discovered throughout Asia, this part of China has been a major gap in the record. Therefore, this site provides important information about what a complete Denisovan body would have been like, as well as intricate details about regional skull variations among these archaic hominins.
A New Technique
The researchers behind the new study developed a novel technique to make the most of the more than 60,000 bone fragments recovered from Bianfu Cave. While Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) has become an important tool in working with hominin fossils, using it on a find of this scale would be inefficient and expensive.
Therefore, the team developed a morphological pre-screening and ZooMS identification technique, which greatly increased their efficiency in recovering hominin fragments from the site and could be applied to other Paleolithic sites in the future.
A total of 22 likely hominin bone fragments were identified in the pre-screening process, from which two parietal bone fragments and one proximal radial fragment were confirmed by ZooMS as belonging to hominins.
Denisovan Remains Uncovered
Two of these hominin remains were excavated from the same layer, dated between 148,000 and 143,000 years old, which also held four hominin teeth. The research team further examined two of those teeth, and a detailed analysis indicated they belonged to males. The third specimen was even older, from a layer dated between 167,000 and 150,00 years old.
By screening the fragments for amino acids, the team identified a variant of COL1A2 R996K unique to Denisovans as present, confirming the species identity of the remains. Other intriguing amino acids in the fragments included one shared by Denisovans, Neanderthals, and modern humans, as well as one that marks them as distinct from Homo erectus, which also occupied East Asia.
As the team closely examined the morphology of skulls excavated from Bianfu Cave, they identified a cranial thickness pattern remarkably similar to H. heidelbergensis and East Asian late Middle Pleistocene archaic Homo.
A New Understanding of Denisovans
After analyzing the morphology of the first Denisovan radius ever discovered, the researchers suggest it was likely oriented similarly to a Neanderthal’s, but with a shape and cross-sectional geometry closer to that found in modern humans.
The importance of the find lies not only in being the first example of its kind, but also in indicating biochemical demands and adaptations distinct from both Neanderthals and modern humans.
Besides Denisova Cave in Siberia, from which Denisovans draw their name, the team believes Bianfu Cave may hold the largest fossil record for the species. This could provide researchers with crucial new data, over a decade into the quest to understand the Denisovan species of Asia.
Based on the age of the layers in which the remains were found, the team says the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau region, where the cave resides, may have been an ideal homing habitat at the time. The Earth would have been in a glacial period, during which the area’s relatively warm climate would have aided hominin survival.
The paper, “Ancient Proteins Identify Various Denisovan Remains from Southwest China,” appeared in Nature on September 9, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.