Historic New Archaeological Discovery Solves Denisovan Mystery. Denisovans were one of the most successful human species to ever live. For over 300,000 years they dominated Asia, in a region characterized by freezing temperatures and high mountains. Incredibly, they are known to have lived at elevations of over 13,000 feet or 4,000 meters even during the coldest of ice ages. The high mountains of Asia are really unknown, because investigators usually just assumed nobody lived there. However, New discoveries have piqued other researchers' curiosity about what else may be hiding at high elevations. In fact, the past climate was even colder than today, so it is even more surprising there were any humans living at such high elevations of western China and Tibet.
While Neanderthals preferred the warmer temperate forests and grasslands of the southwest, Denisovans were much better adapted to colder environments, such as boreal forests and tundra regions in northeastern Eurasia, including the high plateaus of western China and Tibet. Meanwhile, according to a new study Denisovans and Neanderthals would have had a high probability of contact in the Siberian Altai Mountains during relatively warm periods. Southern Siberia is one of the regions predicted for Neanderthal-Denisovan niche overlap. For example, The 90,000 year-old hominin named 'Denny', who was identified as the daughter of a Denisovan father and a Neanderthal mother, demonstrates the possibility that interbreeding was common among early human populations. These hominins lived in Denisova cave about 1,500 miles north of the only other confirmed Denisovan fossil discovery.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 The Siberian Denisovan Mystery
4:00 Denisovans in the Himalayas
8:00 Denisovan High Altitude Adaption
