Build a Denisovan Face

Remember Hesperopithecus haroldcookii, or his more common name, Nebraska Man? It seems mighty presumptuous to build an individual, his wife, animals, the landscape, all from a single tooth. That was silly enough, but it turned out to be the tooth of a pig that was extinct in that area. Oopsie! This overreach came to mind when I was reading about constructing the facial characteristics of Denisovans from DNA.

Denisovan cave image credit: Wikimedia Commons / Xenochka (CC by-SA 4.0)

Scientists got the notion that they can get an idea of what the Denisovans looked like by using DNA, epigenetics, and comparison to humans alive today. Never mind that the DNA has deteriorated over time and is likely to be contaminated. What we do learn is that the Denisovans were another group of humans descended from Adam, and not critters from the failed evolutionary tree. 

Denisovan fossils are represented by only a few teeth, a finger bone, a bit of a mandible (jawbone), and either a leg or an arm bone fragment. These isolated bits and pieces have been found in two locations. One was a Russian cave in the Siberian Altai Mountains close to the borders of Kazakhstan, China, and Mongolia. The other location was farther south in a cave on the Tibetan Plateau. From these teeth and bone fragments, DNA has been sequenced and compared to modern human groups.

You can read the full article by clicking on "Denisovan Epigenetics Reveals Human Anatomy"