Face to Face at Last!
It was a big week last week, but you might have missed the news amidst all the other troubles of the world at the moment. A fifteen-year mystery was finally resolved thanks to a bit of DNA recovered from some dental tartar on an old skull from China. The story of this discovery began years ago hundreds of miles away in southern Siberia at a place called Densiova Cave. Just a small cave, as far as caves go, Denisova Cave opens to roughly the southeast, just above the right bank of the Anuy River. The main chamber today is defaced with recent graffiti, but the sediments excavated from the floor of the cave yielded remarkable discoveries from ages past. Stone tools and hundreds of bone fragments have been recovered. The bone fragments testify to the enduring use of the cave by predators, but the stone tools hinted that people had been there too. With the advent of ancient DNA technology and molecular archaeology, the first really startling report came of a com...