Denisovans occupied Bianfu Cave in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province for an extensive period between 167,000 and 134,000 years ago, according to research published in Nature. Scientists uncovered thousands of Stone Age artefacts, including bone tools and evidence that these archaic humans were skilled deer hunters over a span lasting up to 120,000 years.
Unearthing the Bianfu Cave Sequence
The site’s rich trove of fossils and artefacts provides an unprecedented glimpse into the lives and abilities of the mysterious ancient humans. Workers accidentally stumbled on bones and stone tools in 2019 while starting an ecological restoration of a quarry in southwestern China’s Yunnan Province, according to reporting by Nature and Tech Times. Scientists eventually excavated thousands of objects from the cavern, known as Bianfu Cave.
Protein analysis proved critical for identifying the remains. Ancient proteins are harder and more reliable than ancient DNA for identifying Denisovan fossils. The fossils originated from two separate strata of cave sediment, as pointed out by Qiaomei Fu, a palaeogeneticist at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing who directed the protein research. This distribution points to a sustained regional presence rather than an occasional visit.
Anatomy and Subsistence Strategies
Five pieces of bone recovered from the cave were confirmed as Denisovan through protein fragment analysis: two curved wedges of skull, a portion of a lower arm bone, and two teeth. The arm bone, part of a radius, stands out as one of only a few Denisovan skeletal elements recovered from below the head.
Alongside these skeletal remains, the archaeological layer yielded bone tools closely resembling those crafted by Neanderthals. The material culture indicates that these archaic humans adapted subsistence strategies, specializing in hunting deer and utilizing bone-working technologies that persisted across millennia. As stated by Ben Marwick, an archaeologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who took no part in the study, “This site’s the full package. It’s the first site that we have with a long, rich sequence that’s uniquely associated with Denisovans.”
Mapping the Denisovan Geographic Spread
Denisovans were first described in 2010 following DNA sequencing of a finger bone found in Denisova Cave in Siberia. Subsequent finds have steadily expanded their known geographic range far south and east of that original Siberian site.
Researchers used protein analysis in 2025 to show that a jawbone recovered from ocean sediments off the coast of Taiwan also belonged to a Denisovan, as reported by Nature. Additional pieces of the puzzle include jawbones found on the Tibetan Plateau and a skull unearthed near Harbin in northeastern China, which was confirmed as Denisovan in 2025. The southwestern location of Bianfu Cave is especially significant because it sits closer to regions where Denisovans and modern humans might have intermingled, leaving genetic traces still visible today in the genomes of populations in Papua New Guinea and nearby islands.
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