Earlier this year, a team of researchers, which included one of the authors of the 2021 study, took samples of old protein preserved in the Harbin skull; Of the 95 proteins they found, three of them did not correspond to the proteins that coded in Denisovan’s DNA. While the June 2025 study suggested that A long person was a Denisovan from the start, the new article draws a different conclusion: A long person is a species that includes the population we call Denisovans. As a study co-author Xijun Ni, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, puts it in an email to Ars Technica“Given their age group, distribution zones and available morphological data, it is likely that Denisovans belong to the A man in a long species. However, little is known about Denisovan’s morphology. »»
Of course, this declaration – that we know little about Denisovan’s morphology (the forms and characteristics of their bones) – only applies if you don’t do it Accept the results of the June 2025 study mentioned above, which timed the Harbin skull as Denisovan and therefore told us what looked like.
And Feng and his colleagues, in fact, do not accept these results. Instead, they consider Harbin Part of another group of A long personAnd they question the methods and results of the previous study. “Harbin’s peptide sequences, Penghu and other fossils are too short and provide contradictory information,” said Ars Technica. Feng and his colleagues also question the results of another study, which used mitochondrial DNA to identify Harbin as a Denisovan.
In other words, Feng and his colleagues are quite invested in the definition A long person As a species and Denisovans as a single subgroup of this species. But it is difficult to square with DNA data.
Alas, poor Yunxian 2, I knew him well
Yunxian 2 has a wide face with high and flat cheekbones, a large nasal opening and heavy eyebrows. Its skull is higher and rounder than Man alert (and the original reconstruction, carried out in the 1990s), but it is even longer and lower than that is normal for our species. Overall, it could have contained about 1,143 cubic centimeters of brain, which is in the stage of modern people. But its form may have left less room for the frontal lobe (the field where many social, logical, motor skills and executive function occur) that you expect in a Neanderthal or a Homo sapiens skull.
