For a long time scientists considered that Homo sapiens was the only species of human ever to have existed. Now the fossil record has unearthed humanity’s complex evolutionary past. Since Jean-Baptise Lamark first suggested, as early as 1809, that humans had descended from apes, or hominids, over ten different ancestral groups, hominins, have been identified – the most recent being the Denisovans in 2008.
The first piece of evidence pointing towards the Denisovans’ existence was found in a cave in Siberia, Russia. It was here that a group of archaeologists excavating the Denisova cave in 2008 found a single finger bone and a molar tooth. The finger bone was split into two and sent to different laboratories, one in Germany and one in California, to see if any DNA could be extracted.
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