Proteins from a 1970s dig just gave the Denisovans a face

The fossils sat in collections for nearly 50 years: 20 skull, jaw and tooth fragments excavated at Xujiayao in northern China between 1976 and 1979, argued over ever since. Now ancient proteins extracted from two fragments — work led by Song Xing and Qiaomei Fu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, published in Nature — identify them as Denisovan, the mysterious human lineage known mostly from DNA. With that anchor, the wider collection sketches how Denisovans looked: low, broad skulls with thick bone and strong brow ridges, and faces flatter than a Neanderthal's. A people who lived across East Asia roughly 300,000 to 45,000 years ago are becoming visible.