Cave fossils in China reveal lives of mysterious human relatives
By Katie Hunt, CNN
(CNN) — Archaeologists excavating a cave in southwestern China have unearthed fossilized remains that belonged to an enigmatic population of extinct hominins, revealing new details about their long-lost way of life.
The new haul — which includes four teeth, part of an arm bone and two skull fragments — brings the total number of known fossils from these mysterious human relatives, called the Denisovans, to more than 20. The discovery also establishes Bianfu Cave in the mountains of Yunnan province as a new and exciting locale in the study of human origins.
Alongside the seven Denisovan fossils, the researchers uncovered tools made of bone and stone, as well as fossilized pollen and animal remains. The finds paint a picture of how the Denisovans who called the cave home made a life in the region’s conifer forests 167,000 to 134,000 years ago, according to two studies published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
“We first identified some isolated teeth and then from the huge amount of animal fossils, we identified the bones — but the fragments were very hard to find at the beginning,” said Hao Li, a research professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research in Beijing and a coauthor on both papers.
“We are very lucky because this is the first site in south China to have the direct association between Denisovan fossils and rich cultural remains,” he added. “This is very rare.”
Previously, research on the Denisovans has largely had to rely on isolated discoveries with uncertain and convoluted backstories, such as a skull retrieved from a well in northeastern China and a jawbone dredged from the seafloor by a fishing boat. A team of scientists first identified Denisovans in 2010 from ancient DNA extracted from a tiny finger bone found in Denisova Cave in Siberia, which is how the group got its nickname. The breakthrough was the first time a previously unknown species of hominin had been identified solely based on DNA.
However, Neanderthals, Denisovans and our own species — Homo sapiens — are all known to have sheltered and intermingled in Denisova Cave. Teasing out concrete details about the Denisovan lifestyle from this site alone proved challenging.
That’s why Bianfu Cave, named after the bats that once lived in it, excites paleoanthropologists: It appears to have been occupied only by Denisovans for a substantial period of time. Consequently, researchers found the fossils in their original context alongside tools and other remains that allow archaeologists to date them more reliably and infer unprecedented information about the group’s habits and behavior.
Denisovan cave life
Scientists have hypothesized that Denisovans lived throughout Asia. People today in southeast Asia and Oceania carry the most Denisovan DNA, indicating that Denisovans interbred with modern humans in these areas tens of thousands of years ago. However, most Denisovan fossils have been found in North Asia.
The Bianfu Cave discovery marks only the third place that Denisovans are definitively known to have lived and shows this group occupied a diverse range of environments: Siberian mountains, the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau and the subtropical latitudes.
Researchers combed through 60,000 bone fragments excavated from the cave, identifying two dozen or so that appeared to closely resemble hominin bones and testing them to see whether the fossils contained any useful biomolecular information.
The study authors determined that no ancient DNA had been preserved in the remains. But the team recovered amino acid variants, molecules that make up proteins, that suggested three bones and two teeth were Denisovan, according to the new studies.
The research team categorized the two other teeth, which were too fragile to be sampled in the lab, as Denisovan based on their morphology and comparing them with other known teeth from the species.
“DNA is more vulnerable to degradation than proteins, and it is hard for it to be preserved in these fossils as they were more than 100,000 years old. The relatively warmer climate in Yunnan also hampered DNA preservation,” said study coauthor Qiaomei Fu, a professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Fu was also part of the team that first identified Denisovans in 2010.
The team dug three trenches at the cave site to a depth of 6.6 meters (22 feet), but only one trench yielded human fossils, in two layers of sediment that date back 167,000 to 134,000 years. Stone tools, however, showed up in 10 layers of the same trench, suggesting the site was occupied from 190,000 to 70,000 years ago.
One of the new studies focused on the marks on animal bones and stone tools unearthed in the cave. The authors found that Denisovans who lived in Bianfu fashioned tools from stone and bone and hunted large prey including water buffalo, bison-like gaur, and red and sika deer that lived in the forested environment. The cave’s inhabitants also extracted marrow from bones for sustenance, according to the study.
The stone tools the Denisovans used were not particularly sophisticated, according to Li, who described the artifacts as an “expedient technology.”
“I would not say ‘simple’ because it’s a kind of flexible adaptation,” Li said. “When they used the stone tools, they did not invest a lot of time.”
Li added that it’s most plausible that the site’s only occupants were Denisovans. The team plans to test the cave floor’s sediment for hominin DNA to confirm their hypothesis. “We can say the stone tool technology is stable with continuity, and the hunting strategy is continuous,” he said.
Mysteries remain
As well as extending the known range of the species, the new fossil finds include the first known Denisovan arm bone. The scientists can glean limited information from the bone fragment, but its radius was short, a somewhat like that of Neanderthals, according to Ryan McRae, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.
“And the insertion of the biceps muscle is oriented such that it may have been more efficient at flexing the elbow,” McRae, who wasn’t involved in the research, said.
“More interesting is the site itself,” he added. “It tells us about Denisovan occupation in one location over a sizable span of time while also filling in some geographical gaps in our understanding of Denisovans.”
Until last year, scientists knew very little about what Denisovans looked like, as most of the fossils discovered thus far had been small fragments. However, Fu and her colleagues in 2025 published research on a striking skull known as Dragon Man. The specimen had come to light in 2018 after being stashed at the bottom of a well in the city of Harbin in northeastern China for decades. The research team had extracted genetic material from Dragon Man and linked it to the Denisovans, finally giving the species a face and a proposed scientific name: Homo longi.
Much about the group remains a mystery as scientists only have a finger bone, rib fragment and the forearm bone described in the new research to study. There is still much to uncover about what the Denisovans looked like, how they lived and why they disappeared.
It’s possible Yunnan — which means “south of the clouds” — may provide some answers to these and other questions. Several Stone Age sites have been discovered in the region in recent years, yielding finds such as rarely unearthed wooden tools that date back 300,000 years.
Li said that Yunnan would have offered our archaic human relatives a hospitable climate, rich in plant and animal life. The province likely acted as a crossroads connecting north and south Asia.
“We are in the margins of Tibetan Plateau, above 2,000 meters but not too high altitude,” Li said. “This is a hot spot for biodiversity and would have provided rich resources for ancient hominins in this region.”
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