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A fossilized jaw, flirted with a fishing net from the seabed 15 miles (25 kilometers) off Taiwan in 2010 looked human, but for years, scientists have not managed to nail exactly where it adapts in the human family tree.
Now, scientists have been able to confirm the identity of the mystery fossil, known as Penghu 1, by analyzing the fragments of ancient proteins contained in teeth always attached to the jaw. The jaw belonged to a Denisovan, according to the results published Thursday in the journal Science.
“We have determined and shown in the past two years that these proteins can survive DNA longer than DNA, and that if we have a decent recovery, we can say something about the evolutionary ancestry of a specimen,” said the co -author of the Frido Welker study, an aggregated professor of Paleo -Hropology Biomolecular at the University of Copenhagen in Danmary.
The fishermen working off the coasts of Taiwan have flooded the bones of old animals – elephants, water buffaloes and hyenas – in their nets, the relics of a gilge period passed when the sea level was lower and the ocean channel was a terrestrial bridge.
Denisovan’s man probably lived on this strip of land which once existed between what is now China and Taiwan. This discovery establishes the third place that the ancient enigmatic humans identified for the first time in 2010 for the first time known for having lived and shows that Denisovans occupied a diverse range of environments: the Siberian mountains, the Tibetan plateau at high altitude and the wet subtropical latitudes, added Welker.
Fishermen who find fossils among their catch often sell their discoveries in the Atetics, where collectors collect them, said the co-author of the Chun-Hsiang Chang study, paleontology curator at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Taiwan. The museum has thousands of fossils found in seabed in its collection.
A collector brought the jaw, now identified as Denisovan, at the museum wanting to know more about the specimen, and Chang said that he had immediately realized that he was unusual and encouraged the collector to donate or sell the fossil to the museum, which he did.
An article in co-author in 2015 argued that the fossil belonged to the genus Homo, the grouping to which our species, our Homo sapiens and other ancient humans such as Neanderthals belong, but colleagues were unable to extract any ancient DNA of the fossil and could not verify the exact species.
It was not possible either to precisely date the fossil. Scientists believe that he has an age group between 10,000 and 70,000 or 130,000 and 190,000, dating from bone at a time when the sea level passed in this neighborhood was low.
Chang brought the specimen to Copenhagen in 2022 in the hope of knowing more Welker and other scientists who were pioneer techniques to extract fossil proteins, an area called paleoproteomic.
Chang recalled that the safety of the airport in Copenhagen stopped it when the case containing the jaw crossed an X-ray machine. “They stopped me and wanted me to open (the case),” he said. “I thought they might stop me.” Chang said that he was only authorized to leave after sharing his references and gave the security personnel “a very short lesson in human evolution”.
Before testing the jaw, Welker and his colleagues sampled an elephant bone and a pig bone from the same part of the seabed to determine which extraction methods would work best and determine if the proteins were still present. The team found proteins and proceeded to extract them.
Two sequences of amino acids from the protein recovered from the sample have adorned those known to the genome of Denisovan – a full set of sequenced genetic information from DNA. In addition, laboratory work has detected a type of protein with a specific sex peptide called amelogenin, and peptides specific to chromosome revealed that Denisovan’s individual was a man, Welker said.
The Denisovans were identified for the first time in 2010 in a laboratory using DNA sequences extracted from a tiny finger bone fragment found in the Denisova cave in the Altai mountains of Siberia, this is how the group took its name.
Genetic analysis later revealed that Denisovans, like the Neanderthals, had once been undertaken with the first modern humans. Traces of DNISOVAN DNA found in current days suggest that ancient species have probably experienced a large part of Asia, and the recent discovery of Denisovan fossils from the outside of their homonymous cave began to show that they occupied a wide range of places in Asia.
In 2019, scientists shared a news according to which a jaw found in a cave at the northeast end of the Tibetan plateau, known as Mandible Xiahe, contained a molecular signature of Denisovan. A bone from the Denisovan coast of the same cave was reported in 2024.
In 2022, scientists identified a tooth unearthed in a Laos cave like Denisovan because it looked closely at the tooth of Xiahe’s mandible. The index placed the species in Southeast Asia for the first time, although scientists were unable to obtain any definitive molecular information from the molar to confirm it.
The good preservation of proteins in the Penghu 1 mandible is surprising, since it was at the bottom of the sea for a long time, said archaeologist Zhang Dongju, professor at the Chinese University of Lanzhou who worked on the Xiahe jaw. It was not involved in the study.
“With the accumulation of Denisovan fossils and the increase in the specific molecular signature in Denisovan, the identification of Denisovan fossils will be easier,” she said. “And I believe that more Denisovan fossils will be found and identified in (the future). And we will know more about this mysterious species. ”
Katerina Douka, an associate professor in archaeological sciences at the University of Austria in Vienna, described Denisovans as a paradox because scientists have detailed genetic information on the species but few fossils, so little time we know what they looked like, although she noted that they had “exceptionally important” molars.
Penghu 1 and Xiahe’s mandibles had no wisdom teeth, which could indicate that their jaws did not pass forward in the face, said Ryan McRae, paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.
“None of the mandibles has a chin, like modern humans, so the front of their jaw would probably look flat than ours,” said McRae by e-mail. “The authors judiciously underline that the Penghu mandible is a man, which means that he can present the end of variation greater and more robust for this species. In other words, Denisovans could have the same appearance, or quite different, we simply do not know yet.”
Douka and McRae were not involved in the study.
The mysterious humans do not yet have a largely accepted official name, although some scientists have suggested Homo Juluensis, a classification that brings together Denisovan fossils with other China fossils, including “Dragon Man”, a skull described in 2021.
Chang said he and his colleagues hoped to revisit the 4,000 fossils from the National Museum of Natural Science collection that have been brought together in the seabed in the Taiwan Strait in the past 40 to 50 years and to use the same proteomic methods applied to Denisovans.
“Perhaps inside my collection, there are treasures that we do not know,” said Chang.
