The Scale Of What Was Lost

When we contemplate the Denisovans and the Neanderthals, there is a dimension of the story that is easy to overlook in the excitement of genetic analysis and evolutionary biology: these were human beings.

They were members of our family tree.

And they are gone.

The Denisovans lived in Asia for hundreds of thousands of years.

They developed their own ways of making tools, of exploiting the resources of the landscapes they inhabited, of organizing their social lives.

The archaeological evidence from Denisova Cave includes sophisticated bone needles and personal ornaments — evidence of a behavioral complexity that challenges simplistic narratives about archaic humans as primitive beings waiting to be superseded by modern human sophistication.