The Xiahe mandible
A jaw from a Tibetan cave gives the Denisovans a location outside Siberia — and an altitude.
- When
- Known to
- ± 10 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
A robust hominin mandible found by a monk in Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau, at 3,280 metres, was dated to at least 160,000 years ago and identified as Denisovan through ancient protein analysis when DNA proved unrecoverable. It showed Denisovans occupied the high plateau long before modern humans, and it made sense of a genetic curiosity: the altitude-tolerance variant that Tibetans carry was inherited from Denisovans.