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Fifteen years after the discovery of a new type of human, the Denisovan, scientists discovered its DNA in a fossilized skull. The key? Tooth plaque.
By Carl Zimmer
When Qiaomei Fu discovered a new kind of human 15 years ago, she had no idea what it looked like. There was only a fragment of a pinkie bone to go on.
The fossil chip, found in a Siberian cave called Denisova, looked as if it might have come from a 66,000-year-old relative of today’s humans, or maybe a Neanderthal. But Dr. Fu, then a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and her colleagues found DNA in the fossil that told a different story. The bone had belonged to a girl who was part of a third human lineage never seen before. They named her people the Denisovans.
