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On the Trail of the Denisovans
(www.nytimes.com)
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
When Kevin Bacon noted on Instagram that his morning habits are like those of a Neanderthal, he did not stop to explain that our ancient cousins interbred with modern humans expanding out of Africa.
“The bits of Denisovan we have, it’s almost nothing,” said Janet Kelso, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who helped write the review.
The evidence offers a picture of remarkable humans who were able to thrive across thousands of miles and in diverse environments, from chilly Siberia to high-altitude Tibet to woodlands in Laos — perhaps even in the Pacific islands.
In 2022, Dr. Shackelford and her colleagues made a discovery that could extend the Denisovan range to Southeast Asia, right in the path of modern humans in their early waves out of Africa.
Dr. Shackelford said findings like these raised the possibility that Denisovans and modern humans coexisted and interacted for tens of thousands of years — though whether they communicated is unclear.
Dr. Shackelford predicted that the search for more Denisovan fossils would be hard, because the humid conditions in places like Laos don’t favor the survival of skeletons.
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