U-series dating of a heavy carbonate crust attached to the mandible suggests the fossil is at least 160,000 years old - "a minimum age that equals that of the oldest specimens from the Denisova Cave".
Fossils of Denisovans were first found in the Altai mountains in 2010.
He said numerous Xiahe locals remember the discovery made by the monk almost four decades ago, and that it would be "weird" for a monk to find a mandible somewhere else and then claim to have found it in the Baishiya Karst Cave. Since 2010, researchers Fahu Chen and Dongju Zhang from Lanzhou University have been studying the area of the discovery and the cave site from where the mandible originated. But instead of grinding up the mandible, he handed it over to a local religious leader, who in turn passed it along to Guangrong Dong, a researcher at Lanzhou University in China who studied paleolithic fossils.More news: Avengers: Endgame has NZ's biggest opening week ever
"Given that Denisovan DNA is found in present-day people all over Asia, it was nearly a matter of time until someone would find a Denisovan at some other place than Denisova Cave", Svante Pääbo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who led the team that first discovered the Denisovan species, writes in an email to The Scientist. In 2016, they initiated a collaboration with the Department of Human Evolution at the MPI-EVA and have since been jointly analysing the fossil.
While Dr. Welker and colleagues could not find any traces of DNA preserved in this fossil, they managed to extract ancient proteins from one of the molars. Mirrored parts are in grey. It suggests the mandible belongs to Middle Pleistocene hominin who shares anatomical features with Neandertals and specimens from the Denisova Cave. The same year, a team at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany reported the DNA sequence of a hominin finger bone found in the Denisova Cave in Russian Federation and determined that it belonged to a new species, distinct from Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.
"This minimum age makes the Xiahe mandible comparable in age to Denisova 2, chronologically the oldest Denisovan fossil that is now known from Denisova Cave", said co-author Dr. Chuan-Chou Shen, a scientist in the Department of Geosciences at National Taiwan University.More news: Preorders for Valve’s new VR headset, Valve Index, go live later today
These people had already adapted to living in this high-altitude low-oxygen environment long before Homo sapiens even arrived in the region.
A jawbone found in a cave on the Tibetan Plateau in China is providing surprising insights into Denisovans, the enigmatic extinct cousins to Neanderthals and our own species, including that they were pioneers at enduring high-altitude environments.
The jawbone fossil has two very large molar teeth similar to Denisovans. "Our analyses pave the way towards a better understanding of the evolutionary history of Middle Pleistocene hominins in East Asia".More news: Best Game of Thrones Memes of the Week: Battle of Winterfell