Denisova Cave in brief
Denisova Cave lies in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, near the border with Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China, above the Anuy River. Its three chambers have layers of deposit that go back hundreds of thousands of years, and the cave was used by Denisovans, by Neanderthals and later by modern humans. It is named after Dionisy (Denis), a hermit who is said to have lived there in the 18th century.
Russian Academy of Sciences teams have dug at the cave since the 1970s, more recently under Anatoly Derevianko and Michael Shunkov.
The finger bone
In 2008 the team found a small piece of a finger bone of a child, about 5 to 7 years old, in a layer at least 50,000 years old. It was sent to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where the geneticist Svante Pääbo’s group sequenced the DNA from its mitochondria in 2010. The result was a surprise: it was different from both modern humans and Neanderthals. In 2010 a nuclear genome showed that it belonged to a separate sister group of Neanderthals. They were named Denisovans, after the cave, even though, apart from the finger, only a few teeth and fragments are known.
What we know about the Denisovans
- Looks. Almost nothing is known. The molar teeth are very large, and a jaw from the Tibetan Plateau looks heavy. In 2025 a team reported that the Harbin skull from China, found in the 1930s and also known as “Dragon Man”, has Denisovan DNA and proteins in it, which gave a first idea of the head of a Denisovan.
- Interbreeding. Many people in Melanesia and Aboriginal Australia carry several percent of their DNA from Denisovans. Tibetans carry a gene from them that helps them live at high altitude. Denisovans also mixed with Neanderthals.
- Where they lived. In Siberia, and on the Tibetan Plateau, where a jaw about 160,000 years old from Baishiya Karst Cave in Gansu was identified as Denisovan from its proteins, as well as possibly Laos and Southeast Asia.
The girl with two species as parents
In 2018 researchers reported a bone fragment from the cave of a girl, nicknamed Denny, who died at the age of at least 13, around 90,000 years ago. Her DNA showed that her mother was a Neanderthal and her father was a Denisovan. It is the first known child of two different human groups, and it suggests that such mixing was not rare.
Other finds
The cave contains tools and ornaments from the time of modern humans, such as a bone needle and a bracelet of polished green stone. The dating of the layers has shown that Denisovans lived in the cave on and off from perhaps 200,000 years ago until about 50,000 years ago (dates vary by layer), and that Neanderthals and Denisovans overlapped there.
Why it matters
Before 2010 it was thought that a handful of species made up the family tree of the last 500,000 years. Denisova showed that there was another group, known mostly from DNA, and that our species had mixed with at least two other kinds of human. It gave rise to a new field, using ancient DNA to find fossils that cannot be identified by shape. See Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.
Visiting
The cave is a research site in a remote region. Visits are occasionally arranged by tour operators and local authorities, and the finds are held in Novosibirsk.
Sources
- Krause, J. and others (2010). The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia. Nature 464: 894 to 897.
- Reich, D. and others (2010). Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia. Nature 468: 1053 to 1060.
- Slon, V. and others (2018). The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. Nature 561: 113 to 116.
- Chen, F. and others (2019). A late Middle Pleistocene Denisovan mandible from the Tibetan Plateau. Nature 569: 409 to 412.
- Fu, Q. and others (2025). The Harbin cranium represents a Denisovan lineage. Science.