Archaeology Actually

Kia ora, In my last post to this blog I wrote a bit about the Harbin skull, a remarkable fossil find made more than 80 years ago in the city of Harbin in China's Heilongjiang province and that was first announced to the scientific community last year in three papers  published in the same issue of the scientific journal 'The Innovation' ( Qiang Ji et al. 2021 ;  Qingfeng Shao et al. 2021 ;  Xijun Ni et al. 2021 ) . The cranium is almost complete, but with only one tooth - a huge second molar - and is massive in size, with an endocranial volume of about 1420 ml (larger than the average for modern Homo sapiens - our own species !). Other morphological traits include a prominent  supraorbital torus (brow ridge), a very  broad (wide) yet orthognathic (flat) face  with large, almost  square  eye sockets, a large nasal opening and delicate zygomatic (cheek) bones, and a  cranial vault that   is low and elongated  when viewed side on...

Kia ora, I have previously mentioned on this blog  that the study of human origins is a keen interest area of mine. So, with the recent publication of a couple of relevant research papers, I couldn't resist the opportunity to come back to the topic! The papers in question are on the subject of the Denisovans - an enigmatic group of hominins presently known only from a few very fragmentary fossils recovered from sites in Siberia (Denisova Cave, after which they are named) and on the Tibetan Plateau. These fossils are so fragmentary in fact that no physical description of the Denisovans exists and they have yet to be given a proper species classification like Homo sapiens (the classification of our own species). The presence of hominins distinct from both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals ( Homo neanderthalensis ) at Denisova Cave, in the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia, ca. 50,000 - 30,000 years ago was brought to light thanks to the sequencing of genetic material (DNA) ex...