BiologyJune 6, 2024

Denisovans survived in Tibet by eating everything

Bones from a cave at 3,280 meters reveal their diet over tens of thousands of years.

A rib and thousands of animal bones show that Denisovans, extinct relatives of humans, lived on the roof of the world for a long time.

Story illustration: Denisovans survived in Tibet by eating everything

Denisovans are an extinct human group known from very few fossils. A study published in Nature in 2024 analyzed remains from Baishiya Karst Cave, on the Tibetan Plateau, 3,280 meters above sea level.

The team examined more than 2,500 bones and identified a new Denisovan rib, called Xiahe 2, between 48,000 and 32,000 years old. The animal bones, bearing cut marks, reveal what they ate: mostly blue sheep, but also woolly rhinos, yaks, marmots, birds and even hyenas.

The finding shows that Denisovans exploited a wide variety of animals and adapted to a high-altitude environment for tens of thousands of years, into times when modern humans were already spreading through the region.

The Xiahe 2 rib is a 51.5-millimeter fragment. Since its shape was not enough to identify it, researchers used ZooMS, a technique that recognizes species from collagen proteins in bone. Ancient protein analysis then recovered 4,597 amino acid positions across 21 proteins and placed it with the Denisovans, closest to the individual known as Denisova 3. Until now very few remains of this group were known, mostly from Denisova Cave in Siberia and from the Tibetan Plateau itself.