Neanderthals and Denisovans are some of the nearest ancestors to modern humans. These hominins were so similar to us that they even interbred with humans for thousands of years when the three overlapped in time and space in certain areas. Many people today still carry important genetic material from these cousins of ours — meaning that, in a sense, they never completely went extinct.
Nonetheless, Neanderthals disappeared from the fossil record about 40,000 years ago. Denisovan records are so rare that there really isn’t even a fossil record for these near-humans — there are only a handful of fossils confirmed to be Denisovans by DNA analysis and no complete skeleton so far.
“Unfortunately, [Denisovans] are super mysterious,” says David Gokhman, a geneticist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel who studies Denisovans and Neanderthals. But fossil discoveries and DNA analysis still have given researchers a few clues about the ways the two hominins differed, as well as the characteristics they shared.
