For most of the sixteen years since Denisovans entered the scientific record, they existed almost entirely as a genome. The 2010 discovery came from a finger bone so small that researchers could sequence its DNA before they could say much of anything about the person it belonged to. A new lineage of humanity, sister to the Neanderthals and distinct from us, revealed itself through molecules rather than morphology. Teeth turned up. A jaw. Eventually a skull. But below the neck, Denisovans stayed a mystery.
Two leg bones pulled from the seafloor west of Taiwan are starting to change that, and what they suggest is strange enough to sit with for a while. According to a new analysis, currently posted as a bioRxiv1 preprint2 and not yet peer reviewed, at least some Denisovans were enormous. One individual may have stood close to 1.9 meters and weighed around 91 kilograms. A second stood a bit shorter, around 1.8 meters, at roughly 83 kilograms. Both were almost certainly male, though the researchers, led by Yousuke Kaifu and Chun-Hsiang Chang, could not confirm sex genetically and inferred it from the sheer size of the bones.
To put that in context: a Homo sapiens individual from Tianyuan, China, dated to about 40,000 years ago, stood roughly 1.7 meters and weighed about 73 kilograms. The Denisovans from Taiwan would have towered over him.
