In 2008, Russian researchers excavated a site called Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. Amongst a variety of Neanderthal tools was a fragment of a finger bone, presumed to be nothing out of the ordinary. When German researchers sequenced the DNA two years later, they discovered something remarkable. Not only did the DNA fail to match that of Neanderthals or modern humans, but it appeared to belong to an unidentified extinct hominin species, the Denisovans.
What Evidence Do We Have?
