Since the discovery of the Denisovan human species in Siberia in 2010, the world has been agog to know more about them. But discoveries have been confined to isolated bones in Asia, and we had no unqualified information about their material culture. Now for the first time, a cave only Denisovans could have used for more than 100,000 years has been found in a cave on the Chinese Tibetan Plateau.The fossil bones of the Denisovans in Bianfu Cave date to around 167,000 to 134,000 years ago. The artifacts range from about 190,000 to 70,000 years and include mostly stone but also a handful of bone tools, Qijun Ruan, Bo Li, Fahu Chen and colleagues reported Wednesday in Nature. The dates aren't inconsistent – Denisovans plausibly made and dropped tools in the cave throughout the 120,000+ year span, but the vast majority of their remains were not preserved. Some paleo-hyena remains may help explain that.There may have been gaps in the cave's occupation, but the sequence stands and not only were Denisovan bones actually found, they're also the likeliest candidate for occupant. Homo erectus only went extinct in Asia about 100,000 years ago, but he isn't considered a candidate for this cave. Thus, the Bianfu bat cave finds represent "one of the longest cultural records most parsimoniously attributed to Denisovans," according to a second paper on the cave also published Wednesday in Nature by Huiyun Rao, Feng Liu, Qiaomei Fu and colleagues, discussing the analyses that identified some of the 60,000 bones in the cave as Denisovan.So the finds, including fossil pollen, animal bones from their meals and hyenas, bring us the first direct insight into the way Denisovans were. At least those in a pine forest on the slopes of the Hengduan Mountains in the Middle Pleistocene.Hitherto and still, we don't know much about the Denisovans. They were only discovered in 2010 after a fossil pinkie bone discovered in Denisova Cave, Siberia was identified to the general shock of all: neither Neanderthal nor Homo sapiens as assumed, but really an unknown human species. They were called the Denisovans.Most of the roughly 20 fragmented Denisovan bone fragments and teeth found so far were in Denisova Cave. In 2019 a jawbone was found in Xiahe on the Tibetan plateau; a tooth unearthed in a cave in Laos in 2022 turned out to be Denisovan and last year, 2025, another jawbone dredged up from the Taiwanese seabed years earlier was identified as a huge Denisovan, probably male. A rib found in Baishiya Cave, Tibet was outed as Denisovan too.Evidently Tibet was blessed with Denisovans. But that collection doesn't tell us much about them. The happiest day for paleoanthropologists arrived when a fossil skull found in Harbin, China a century earlier was belatedly reclassified in 2025 as Denisovan. At least some researchers suspect that several more ancient skulls in Asia are too.The few bones found so far were starting to suggest that the Denisovans were a beefy lot, similar to the biggest erectuses and taller on average than sapiens. Yet about their material culture, we knew zip. Denisova Cave has tons of tools and some were presumably Denisovan but the cavern also has remains from all three species, Denisovan, Neanderthal and Homo sapiens, and proving which species used what implement is a challenge. Now at Bianfu, we have a protracted Denisovan sequence with about 1,300 artifacts they made. That, Dorothy, is material culture.By and large the finds support the assumption that Denisovans lived much like their sister species, the Neanderthals (sister species means they had a common ancestor), even if they were bigger.What bones were found at Bianfu? Four teeth, expanding the recognized dental variation of Denisovans, the team says. The molars resemble Denisovan teeth found in Xiahe and Laos, and also teeth of an archaic hominin from Hualongdon from 300,000 years ago, which some now suspect was an early Denisovan. Bianfu also produced two cranial fragments and a forearm bone, which shows similarities with Neanderthal characteristics but is shaped more like ours, they say.It all fits with the little we know.A replica of a skull belatedly considered to be Denisovan, housed at the Shaanxi Provincial Museum in China. Credit: Gary Todd/FlickrA replica of a skull belatedly considered to be Denisovan, housed at the Shaanxi Provincial Museum in China. Credit: Gary Todd/FlickrThe human familyThis is the thinking: Homo sapiens, Denisovans and Neanderthals all sprouted from the same root, in Africa, possibly 800,000 years ago – we really don't know. At some point, perhaps around 550,000 years ago, the lineage that would produce Homo sapiens split from the lineage that would produce the Denisovans-Neanderthals. Homo sapiens continued to evolve in Africa, but the common ancestor of the Denisovans-Neanderthals continued its story in Eurasia. Neanderthals would emerge in Europe while Denisovans surfaced in Asia, mastering territory that ranged from freezing lands at extreme altitudes to humid subtropics.So we already know that Denisovans and Neanderthals are sister species and we might expect similarities. Note that shortly after Homo sapiens' emergence in Africa, we began to roam beyond the continent; there is evidence suggesting a confab of Neanderthals and early sapiens 250,000 years ago.Note that our very beings hint at the Neanderthal and Denisovan ranges. All modern non-Africans have traces of Neanderthal genes, so the common ancestor to all living Europeans and Asians mixed with Neanderthals. Westerners typically have no Denisovan DNA but Asian peoples do have Denisovan genes as well as Neanderthal. The strongest signals are in Southeast Asia and Oceania, where the Denisovan component can be as high as 6% (inferring relatively recent admixture).The stone tools were stone tools and the bone tools at Bianfu were "unmodified" – which means they used bones to achieve things without knapping or otherwise changing them. The artifacts smack of Neanderthal techniques, Chen and his team reported – "Despite the considerable geographic separation, these bone tools show clear technological parallels with Middle Palaeolithic bone implements associated with Neanderthals," they wrote, suggesting shared cultural capacities. They add that the find suggests "bone tool use may have been more widespread among Pleistocene populations than previously recognized."Once, in our condescension, we thought that only Homo sapiens cleverly made tools out of bone, but this has been disproved. In fact, the thinking now is that hominins utilized bones a lot more than had been realized, because stone tools don't decay but bones do. Separate research suggests bones were being used as tools in Ethiopia 2.5 million years ago and another study identified bone tool manufacture in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania 1.5 million years ago.So finding bone tools in the Denisovan context is no surprise, merely a delight. Of bone tools, seven were identified of which five are believed to have been "retouchers," the archaeologists say, which refers to a piece of bone, antler or tusk that hominins used to shape and/or sharpen other, stone tools. Why would they use feeble bone to achieve that? Apparently precisely because bone is softer than stone so enabled finer adjustments of the implement, compared with the brute force of a blow from stone.Of stone tools, the team reports 1,366: cores, flakes and manufacturing waste. They used the locally available sandy mudstone, the teams say.Other bones found in the cave that weren't too fragmented to be identified by paleozoologists, reveal the secrets of the Denisovan diet: They had no secrets; they ate the same animals Neanderthals and we would have. Previous work in Tibet, at Baishiya Cave, found predominantly blue sheep. At Bianfu, the Denisovans doted on Cervidae (deer) and Bovidae (cattle), and also ate buffalo and bison, which were likely the biggest herbivores left around. Some goat was found and the analyses also identified a smidgen of rhinoceros, which they may have eaten. We know that Neanderthals ate of the rhino as well as the mammoth. The Denisovans probably didn't eat the hyenas of whose bones were found – in fact the reverse might be true.Artist's rendering of a marmot observing a woolly rhinoceros Credit: Daniel Eskridge / Shutterstock.comArtist's rendering of a marmot observing a woolly rhinoceros Credit: Daniel Eskridge / Shutterstock.comNote that rhinos only went extinct in China in the 20th century, due to hunting pressure and habitat loss. In Tibet, there had been a woolly rhinoceros on the plateau but it vanished around 2.6 million years ago, so we and the Denisovans are off the hook for its extinction there.What do we learn? That like the Neanderthals and us, the Denisovans were hunters of large to medium prey. The archaeologists identified a prime-dominated hunting strategy, meaning, Denisovans deliberately hunted mature adult animals. Like us and the Neanderthals, they smashed long animal bones to obtain marrow and grease, which separate research has demonstrated to be key to the paleodiet, the archaeologists deduced.The identity of the animals and analysis of fossil pollen show the Denisovans were living either in a pine forest or forest-steppe, which means grassland interspersed with tree clusters. Sounds nice. Ultimately, the Denisovans seem to have successfully occupied a vast range of habitats in Asia, with at least some adapting to life at high elevation and thin air. Some of us were lucky enough to have inherited that trait, for instance Tibetan sherpas.The bottom line is that the seven Denisovan bones found in Bianfu Cave join isolated Denisovan remains around Asia below the glaciers; and being associated with tools, we gain a glimpse at their culture, which was like that of their sister species the Neanderthals, which is as anticipated. We wanted to know and now we do.