Project description:Genetic and limited palaeoanthropological data suggest that Denisovans, a sister group to Neanderthals, were once widely distributed in eastern Eurasia, likely stretching from high-latitude Siberia, to the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau, to the low-latitude subtropical regions of southeast Asia. This suggests that Denisovans were capable of adapting to a highly diverse range of environments, but archaeological evidence for this is currently limited. As a result, we know little about their behaviours, including subsistence strategies, across the vast areas they likely occupied. Here, we describe the late Middle to Late Pleistocene faunal assemblage from Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau, where the Xiahe Denisovan mandible and Denisovan sedimentary mtDNA were found, by integrating proteomic screening into traditional zooarchaeological analysis. The results indicate that the faunal assemblage consists of a diverse range of animals, including megafauna, large mammals, small mammals and birds, but is dominated by medium-sized herbivores. Frequent cut marks and percussion traces on bone surfaces throughout the assemblage, even on carnivore bones, indicate that Denisovan activities in Baishiya Karst Cave from at least 190 to 30 thousand years are responsible for the fauna assemblage accumulation. Thorough utilization of acquired animal resources, even perhaps the fur, too, might have helped Denisovans to survive through the last two glacial-interglacial cycles on the cold high-altitude Tibetan Plateau. Our results shed new light on Denisovan behaviours and their adaptations to the diverse and fluctuated environments in the Middle and Late Pleistocene eastern Eurasia.
Project description:An archaeological bone fragment from Baishiya Karst Cave, China, was identified as stemming from a hominin through ZooMS (Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry). Shotgun palaeoproteomic analyses were thereafter conducted on the specimen to refine the taxonomic identification and perform phylogenetic analyses. The reconstruted proteome shows that the newly described Baishiya Karst Cave individual, Xiahe 2, is most closely related to the high-coverage published genome from a Denisovan individual.
