More ancient DNA from more sites across Asia would help address these questions, but the preservation conditions that allowed Denisova Cave’s remarkable DNA survival are exceptional, not typical.

A related question is what eventually happened to the Denisovans.

Like the Neanderthals, they are not present in the world today as a distinct living population — they apparently became extinct at some point in the past.

Unlike the Neanderthals, whose extinction roughly 40,000 years ago is reasonably well-dated and plausibly connected to the expansion of modern humans into Europe, the Denisovan extinction is poorly understood.

When did it happen?