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 completely unknown hominin.  I commented very briefly on this back in 2010 when it was originally published, but my comments are bare bones at best.  Indeed, what is there to say?  Here was a tiny bone fragment that yielded a very obviously human-like genome that was neither Homo sapiens nor Neandertal.  What was it like?  Who can say?  We often complain about a lack of data from fragmentary fossils, but this really took the cake.

Subsequent discoveries confirmed others of this same mysterious human variety present in the same cave.  With no fossils other than fragments to formally name, they were dubbed simply Denisovans, after the cave where they were found.  The most astonishing discovery came in 2018, when a tiny fragment from the cave was found to be the remains of a girl who had a Neandertal mother and a Denisovan father!  She was a first generation hybrid, a genuinely amazing discovery!

But what did they look like?  A year after this hybrid fossil was identified, a partial mandible from southern China, the Xiahe mandible, became the first Denisovan fossil positively identified outside of Denisova Cave.  In 2022, a handful of Denisovan teeth were found in a cave in Laos.  Earlier this year, another mandible dredged from the Taiwan Strait proved to be yet another Denisovan.  But still, where were the skulls or other body remains?  How could something so different from Neandertals leave behind a fossil record that has gone very nearly undetected despite more than a century of exploration?  What did they look like?

The answer, confirmed last week, came from a very unexpected place.  In 1933, before we even knew what a DNA sequence was let alone how to get one from fossils, a Chinese man working for the Japanese occupation found an unusual skull along the banks of the Songhua River near the city of Harbin in China.  Fearing what the Japanese might do with it, he hid it in a well and kept its existence secret for decades until he related the story to his family as he neared death.  They recovered the skull in 2018, and in 2021, a formal description of the skull was published.  The researchers called it the Dragon Man, Homo longi, and they noted that his teeth looked a lot like the few known teeth of Denisovans.

Now, that initial observation of tooth similarity was publicly confirmed.  DNA recovered from the Dragon Man cranium matched very closely DNA recovered from those bone fragments from Denisova Cave.  This at last, gave us a hint at what the face of a Denisovan looked like.  The image accompanying this article presents a reconstruction of the Dragon Man cranium made by John Gurche.  Yes, there are a lot of details that are imaginative, but the shape of the face is what counts in this reconstruction.  It looks very Neandertal in some parts, but it lacks that protruding nose so characteristic of Neandertals.

What's even more interesting to me are the other remains thought to closely resemble the Dragon Man skull.  A study of the shape of the Dragon Man skull revealed a close affinity with the Xiahe mandible from China and a number of other intriguing fossils:

• Dali cranium - Found in central China in 1978, this toothless cranium came from farther east than the Xiahe mandible
• Hualongdong remains - A collection of skeletal elements including partial skulls from eastern China found in 2006
• Jinniushan skeleton - A partial skeleton from northeastern China, just west of the Korean peninsula

These similarities make a lot of sense, since they're all from the same region and they share a lot of features in common.  It seems likely to me that they will also share Denisovan DNA, and I'm sure there are efforts already underway to recover DNA and confirm this ancient human form found in China.

I'm pretty excited that we finally have a face for these ancient people and potentially even a skeleton from Jinniushan.  It's been fifteen years, but totally worth it to finally start making sense of these enigmatic human fossils and the strangely distinct DNA.  As Proverbs tells us, "Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country."

What does this mean for our understanding of creation and the history of humanity?  Well, it's even more diverse than we thought.  Creationists have long recognized Neandertals as human, and there's been a strong tradition for 30 years to accept Homo erectus as well.  Now we can definitively add to that list the Denisovans, Homo longi.  What more wonders will we discover in the future?

Feedback? Email me at toddcharleswood [at] gmail [dot] com. If you enjoyed this article, please consider a contribution to Core Academy of Science. Thank you.

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