Discovery of Denisovans: A New Human Species

In 2010, scientists announced the discovery of a previously unknown hominin species based on DNA extracted from a finger bone found in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. The 40,000-year-old finger fragment, recovered in 2008, belonged to a young female whose genetic sequence revealed a distinct branch of the human family tree, neither Homo sapiens nor Neanderthal. Svante Pääbo and his team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology determined the Denisovans had diverged from Neanderthals approximately 390,000 years ago. This marked the first time scientists identified a hominin species through genetic evidence rather than morphological features.