The Fascinating Story Of Our Mysterious Relatives, The Denisovans, With Prof. Bence Viola

And so they told me, you know, we got mitochondrial DNA from this finger bone from Denisova cave. They said, oh, it's from layer 11. And I was, you know, I knew Denisovac cave and I was like, okay, so it's probably a Neanderthal, isn't it? And they were like, no, it's something different. And they were like, you know, it's neither a Neanderthal nor a modern human. It's something completely different, which was pretty, pretty mind blowing. We found that the last cone ancestor of this finger bone and modern humans lived more than a million years ago. which was in strong contrast to the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans, which based on the mitochondrial DNA at the time, we calculated as between 400

,000 and 500 ,000 years ago. So this was an individual from a group that was twice as far away from us or twice as distant from us as Neanderthals, which was a huge surprise. And so, you know, this was unbelievable. And then it became even crazier because... Bence Viola is a professor at the University of Toronto, a paleoanthropologist focusing on one of the most riveting features of our prehistoric past. And that's the nature of contacts between different hominin groups in the late Pleistocene. Professor Viola, welcome to the show. Yeah, thank you. It's nice to be here. I'll have to be honest. The fact that only some 60 ,000 years ago, a blink of an eye on the timescale of Earth's history, really, five

different species of humans walked the planet together at the same time. still makes my brain want to leak out through my ears or something. I'm just having a really hard time internalizing this image somehow. I'm not sure if it's because of my schooling, which happened some time ago, to be fair, in which, with the exception of the Neanderthals, presented this sort of like, I'm sure you're familiar with it, classical linear arrow of human evolution. Or it's simply because of my species -based narcissism, you know. We're the only ones here now because we're obviously so exceptional and amazing. And that's how it was meant to be. Also, I have to say, I have the feeling when I get to think about it right

now, it's a mixture of dread, but also a tinge of loneliness. Just to explain. The first one, because I talk to a lot of historians on this podcast, and even with us modern humans, usually when we encounter other groups of modern humans, the same species that just might look or behave slightly differently. It's usually a horror show.

I mean, when Columbus came to the so -called New World, the aftermath was an outright apocalypse for the indigenous populations. On the other hand, how cool would it be to have a Neanderthal friend in 2026 to open a really stubborn jar for you or something? And also a Benissavan friend to, and here comes a big question mark, because I have no idea what they were like. And that's where you come in, professor, to clear the fog of these highly mysterious. relatives of ours, relatives we've only known about since 2008 or 2010, if I'm not mistaken. So in total, less than 20 years. So first of all, tell me about this discovery and about how crazy it must have felt at the time. Yeah, I mean, you know, the

reason that you didn't learn about this in school is that, as you said, you know, most of these species were unknown up until very recently. I mean, I think of the kind of the ones that were around 60 ,000 years ago, the one discovered first, of course, were Neanderthals in the 19th century. But then Homo floresiensis from the island of Flores was only discovered. The Hobbit.

Yes, the Hobbit was only published in 2004. The Denisovans were published in 2010. I mean, Homo luzonensis from the Philippines came out about 2015, 16, something like that. So, you know, a lot of these groups, you had no idea that they were around. And I think that we were almost, I'd say, complacent in some ways. We were just assuming that we knew what's going on. We assumed in Eurasia, you know, things are going to be Neanderthals or modern humans. And that was exactly what we expected in Denisovas. So I was to kind of to go back to 2010 or 2009 when these discoveries were made. I was quite familiar with Denisova Cave. I did my PhD on Neanderthals in Central Asia. And one of the sites I studied was actually

Denisova Cave. I looked at two teeth that were found in the 1980s that were described originally by an American dental anthropologist, by Christy Turner, as Neanderthals in 1986. He had like a brief mention. He wrote about a page about them and said, you know, these seem to be Neanderthals. And so I studied this material and material from nearby in the Altai, from another site called the Kladnikov Cave and from some sites in Uzbekistan as well. And I felt that at least the stuff from Denisova didn't really look Neanderthal -like.

So I defended my PhD in 2009 and then went to Leipzig to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, which is kind of the hotbed of... human origins research, you know, it has the geneticists at the department at the time was led by Svante Paabo, who, of course, later on won the Nobel Prize for his discoveries of ancient genomes. And also Jean -Jacques Hublin, who was the head of the human evolution department. And so I went there to do a postdoc and work with both of them on the interface of genetics and paleoanthropology. And really the day I got to Leipzig, this was in December 2009, I had in our new place, we had the internet installed.

And one of the first emails I got once they hooked up the internet was from Svante from the Max Planck saying that, you know, you're only officially starting beginning of January, but we have some very weird results. Can you come in and talk to us? And so I went in and I met with him and with Johannes Krause, who was at the time, he was a PhD student. who was working on the Denisova finger bone. And so they told me, you know, we got mitochondrial DNA from this finger bone from Denisova cave. They said, oh, it's from layer 11. And I was, you know, I knew Denisova cave and I was like, okay, so it's probably a Neanderthal, isn't it? And they were like, no, it's something different. And they were like, you know, it's

neither a Neanderthal nor a modern human. It's something completely different, which was pretty, pretty mind blowing, especially because, you know, once Johannes did the... phylogenetic trees and calculated the last common ancestor between modern humans and this finger bone that at the time we referred to as the X woman. We found that the last common ancestor of this finger bone and modern humans lived more than a million years ago, which was in strong contrast to the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans, which based on the mitochondrial DNA at the time, we calculated as between 400 ,000 and 500 ,000 years ago. So this was an individual from a group that was twice as far away from

us or twice as distant from us as Neanderthals, which was a huge surprise. And so, you know, this was unbelievable. And then it became even crazier because just a few days later, we flew to Novosibirsk to talk to our Russian colleagues who discovered the finger bone. When we were there, this was early January, Anatoly Derevyanko, who was the archaeologist, who was the head of the team in Russia, he went in his chest pocket of his shirt when we were talking and pulled out a tooth and showed me that tooth. And that tooth was what we call the niece of a four. And looking at it, it was very clear to me that, yeah, the geneticists are right. You know, this is neither a Neanderthal nor a modern human.

It was absolutely enormous. Like we, you know, later on, I did the analysis and in modern humans, there's like one in 10 ,000 modern humans who would have a molar this big. And in Neanderthals, it's also, there's one pathological one from Uzbekistan, but otherwise they are all much, much, much smaller. So, you know, it was clear that this is something really weird. Wait, the molar. was bigger than an average Neanderthal molar and an average modern human molar. Yes, like much, much, much larger. It was a Godzilla molar. Yeah, it's so, you know, we brought it back to Leipzig and I met with a colleague in Leipzig who studied early Homo, so these species that lived about 2 million years ago in East

Africa. And I showed him this tooth and I was like, Fred, what do you think? And his opinion was like, oh, did you find this in Ethiopia? because he thought that this is something that, you know, has to be from some of these earlier species, from Homo rudolfensis or Homo habilis or something similar. And when I told him that, you know, no, it's 50 ,000 years old from Siberia, he was pretty surprised. Compared to, let's say, the Neanderthals, why have we found so few Denisovan remains? I mean, you know, I think it's partly historical. You know, Neanderthals lived in Europe where... Archaeology has been done intensively since the 19th century. There have been excavations at sites in France, you know, starting in the

1850s and in Germany. And also Neanderthals were, at least in some parts of Europe, were around quite a bit. Probably that was kind of their core area. For the Nisovans, the areas where, you know, they were probably around a lot, places like... probably Southeast Asia, but also large parts of China, paleoanthropological research started later and it was focused on different things. I think it's mostly a question of how intensively the research has been done. And also, you know, it turns out that some of the, or quite a few of the fossils we've known from East Asia, for example, are actually Denisovans. I mean, there was a paper just less than a week ago showing that... teeth and cranial fragments from a site

called Xujiayao in northern China were indeed Denisovans. And they showed this using proteomics. They looked at the proteins in the enamel. Even though with Xujiayao, I mean, the morphology of the teeth, like the shape of the molars and so on, is actually very similar to what we see in the Denisovans cave. So we suspected this, but it was only shown now using proteomics, convincingly.

What's the kind of... demarcation line between one species of hominins versus the other because these guys and gals apparently had no problem kind of getting jiggy with it you know doing a bit of cave tinder swiping and successfully producing babies together so what is it that makes us differentiate or be able to differentiate one type of human from another is it just the energy it's a very hard question You know, I mean, the problem, of course, is that defining species in general is difficult. You know, there's like 50 different species concepts or ways that biologists define what a species is. And the one you learn in school usually and most people think of the biological species concept means

that, you know, species is a group of individuals that can breed within but do not interbreed with individuals outside this group. And, you know, if we take this strictly, then Neanderthals and Denisovans and modern humans are not separate species because they could all breed with each other. But the problem is if you apply kind of the same concept, for example, to polar bears and grizzly bears, which, you know, a three -year old can tell apart. They look different. They live in different climates. They behave differently.

They eat different things. But we know from genetics that these species happily interbreed and have interbred. There are grizzly bear populations out there that carry about the same amount of polar bear DNA as we carry Neanderthal DNA. So, you know, I think the main outcome of these genetic studies in the last 20 years is that species boundaries are much leakier than we think. And so I think, you know, I actually usually speak when I talk about Denisovans, I like to call them a population or a group because I think calling them a species would imply to certain or to the general public that this is something really completely different from us, even though in reality, as you said, you know, our ancestors

recognized them as potential mating partners. They were similar enough that they knew that they could reproduce, or at least they tried. Okay, back to that Godzilla molar you mentioned before that I can't stop thinking about. If we juxtapose sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans sort of side by side with each other, what were some of the key biological differences between them? Or maybe that would be some of the things that would immediately jump out regarding the way they looked in terms of differences. Yeah, I mean, you know, of course, our knowledge of Denisovans is still quite limited because even with the discoveries in the last 15 years, we only have, I'd say, one cranium that's reliably

Denisovan. We have two lower jaws and then otherwise it's mostly isolated teeth and fragments. And we have very little with regards to post crania. So the general body build is not very well known. But based on the skull, It looks like they were very large. And that also fits with there's two bones from near Taiwan that seem to be or could be Denisovans, a femur and a tibia, so a shin bone and a thigh bone. And both of those are also very large. They come from individuals that are, you know, I always imagined them build -wise like a rugby player or American football player, like big muscular dudes. But also like taller or just like more muscular or both? Probably both. I don't think the stature was, you know,

over, you know, they were probably on the tall end of modern humans and they were probably taller than Neanderthals. You know, Neanderthals are heavy, but tend to be relatively stocky, even though, again, it's not that extreme. You know, they are not, you know, like a male Neanderthal would be 170, 175 centimeters, something like that in that range, maybe a female slightly shorter.

So, you know, they are not, they're not tiny. But the Nicevens might have been a little bit bigger. And they also, they have very large skulls. So the Harbin cranium, which is a skull discovered in China, actually originally, supposedly in the 1930s during the Japanese occupation, but was hidden for a long time and was only published in 2020 or 21. This Harbin cranium is the largest hominin cranium that has ever been discovered.

It's huge. It's a really, really big guy. Also with large brains. So one of the interesting things, you know, people always assume that modern humans are around because they had the largest brains and they were the smartest. Actually, in brain size, you know, Neanderthals are also comparable to us. And there's actually some of the largest brains of fossil humans that we know are from Neanderthals. they are actually slightly, slightly larger on average than modern humans, even though if you correct for body mass, this is not necessarily true anymore. But, you know, their brain size, I would say, is at least in the same ballpark as ours. And same with Denisovans, like large heads and brains. And, you know, one

of the things that you probably notice is the large brow ridges. You know, in general, these crania are massively built, also probably coming, you know, with strong muscles, but large brow ridges. In Neanderthals, you have this probably very large nose. We're not 100 % sure how the nose of Denisovans would have looked like. I think that needs a bit of study still. But you probably would have been able to distinguish the faces of these groups from each other. How do we know that Neanderthals had large noses?

But despite the fact that we do have... a whole skull of a Denisovan, we don't know what their noses look like. Because noses, you know, they just rot away. They're not bone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, like the parts of the nasal aperture and the harbing cranium are not as well preserved. You know, the upper part of the nose and the nasal spine here at the bottom. And so I don't think that's present. And so, you know, people have studied Neanderthal noses for a long time and tried to do different reconstructions.

There are just many more Neanderthal crania and many of them well preserved. So we can have a much better idea. I think with Harbin, we're still a bit limited here. Okay, that's why I'm not an anthropologist. That was a very convincing answer. You partly gave me the answer to this already, but I'm going to ask anyway. Let's say you're part of like a band of Neanderthal hunters some 70 ,000 years ago. I don't know, tracking.

some large game. And when you turn a corner, you suddenly come face to face with a group of Denisovans. Do you think you would immediately know that these people are different? Or would you think, no, they're just like us, they're just like me, only a bit more odd looking, that's all? That's, again, a very good question. I mean, there's kind of two, I think two sides to the answer of this. I mean, one of them is, you know, we know about Neanderthals, for example, due to... genetic data that they lived in small groups that were quite isolated. So we have actually DNA from 13 individuals from the cave that's here above in my background picture. That's Chigirska Cave in the Altai. We actually have DNA from

13 Neanderthals from this site. And what we could show is that they were all very closely related to each other. This is a tiny group of maybe 20 or 25 people. who rarely received input from the outside. Maybe every few generations, somebody came in. But in general, you know, these were all extremely closely related. So, you know, I'm asking myself, anyone who would have been from outside their group would have been someone weird, would have been someone they haven't seen.

And so, you know, yes, probably a Denisovan would have looked different. But I don't think it would have looked that much more different to them than, you know, suddenly seeing a Neanderthal from further away. I mean, you know, I think we completely underestimate due to, you know, our constant exposure to people of all varieties, you know, on TV, on social media or in real life.

You know, I live in Toronto, which is probably the diversest city in the world with people from all around the world here. And so I see people of every variation, you know, of every skin color. various statures, various, you know, shapes and sizes. And I think that, you know, a Neanderthal that lived in a group of 20 did not have that.

Like their sole reference, like frame of reference, was the 20 or 25 individuals that they knew. And, you know, maybe they met with other groups sometimes, but it can't have been too often. Otherwise, we would see more gene flow between these groups. Yeah, you reminded me of, I don't know, there's some footage and I'm probably...

totally gonna butcher it on youtube of some i don't know some french anthropologist in maybe papua new guinea or something and he's filming his his uh contact with some indigenous people there and it's their first time seeing a white person and they look like they've seen a ghost or something they keep touching their skin and they they're they're afraid and they're like pointing their uh their bows and arrows at them and um they're the same They're exactly the same species. They only look a little bit different and come from different areas. So it makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, we know that these people were interbreeding sometimes, right?

So they didn't look too weird to each other. Actually, sometimes they looked attractive to each other. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's interesting is we know, for example, in recent humans, one of the things that's happening is... attractiveness is in part linked to how different you are in some genes that are linked to your immune system, in the HLA system. So people who are more different than you seem more attractive, and this is mostly running through pheromones and your sense of smell. So maybe because they were so different, they were more attractive.

But the way I also describe it always, If you're a Neanderthal living in a group with 20 others, the dating pool is very shallow. You have your cousin Bob or the ugly guy from behind a mountain. I think it's a really straightforward choice. My mom's going to kill me for saying this, but on her side, the family comes from one tiny mountain for generations and stuff with not a lot of people around. So I think there was some of the same stuff going on in our family for the generations.

One last name at the local cemetery and that's it. And I felt my genes screaming for something. Okay, I'm going to end it there. Do we know anything about the Nisovan culture? For example, did they use fire? What did they eat? Did they wear clothes? Could they talk, et cetera? Yeah, I mean, you know, again, these are difficult questions. I mean, one of the problems is that we have few sites where we... only have Denisovans. So, you know, like Denisova Cave has the issue that we have Denisovans and Neanderthals and they kind of like occur one after the other. And so we have a lot of different cultural, a lot of different layers and cultural horizons, but it's not always 100 % sure who made those. You know, a stone

tool doesn't came with a label on it that says made by, you know, Mr. Denisovan or something else. So it can be quite difficult. And what's... interesting in Denisova that based on the stone tools there does not seem to be much difference between the layers that were produced by Neanderthals and by Denisovans. There's really very little difference. There's some slight differences in the fauna, in the exploitation of the animals, but again that's less clear. But I mean the nice thing is that we have now like new sites like Baishiya karst cave in Tibet that is this very high altitude Denisovan site at like 3 ,700 meters in Xiahe province in China and there there's only Denisovans at least up until now so we can

look a little bit at how they were hunting there and then just a couple of weeks ago or maybe three weeks ago some Denisovan teeth were published from a site called Bianfu Cave in southern China, or not really southern anyway, but I mean further south than the other sites. And so there we actually see quite a bit about the hunting of Denisovans, because again we only have Denisovans there and we have a rich record. So we see evidence for the use of fire, we see stone tools, of course we see We see hunting, actually relatively specialized hunting even. So I think that we'll slowly get a better picture of this. There should be some differences from Neanderthals. You know, they lived in different environments. I mean, all

these hominins clearly were able to adapt to extremely diverse environments. I mean, Denisovans, you have them in the Altai in southern Siberia, which, you know, it's not Arctic, but it's a relatively cold place. You have them in high altitudes in Tibet. And, you know, if you're also right, we have them in the Strait of Taiwan between Taiwan and China, which is decidedly subtropical. And then maybe even there's the site of Cobra Cave in Laos, where there is a tooth from that also seems to be a Denisovan.

which is tropical Southeast Asia. So they clearly were present in very different climates and environments, and they had to adapt differently to these. So they had very plastic behaviors. And the same is true with Neanderthals. You have Neanderthals from the Near East, from Israel and Iraq today, into Siberia or into Northern Germany and Poland.

And again, wherever they are, and depending on the local environment, they hunt different things. use different plants. They show different behaviors. You know, we, again, Neanderthals use fire. They don't always use it. So one of the interesting things with Neanderthals is that there are Neanderthal sites where there's very little use of fire.

It's not completely, I don't think it's that they were incapable of. Maybe sometimes they just didn't bother. They just weren't cold enough to, you know, go through all the... all the work of, you know, collecting firewood. And, you know, if you don't have a lighter or matches, like making a fire is a bit more complicated. You can't just relight it easily every morning. So, you know, sometimes they just couldn't be bothered.

That sounds familiar to me. Do you like cold camping? No, I just can't be bothered with a lot of stuff. By the way, I just presume, since you were talking about how Neanderthals and Denisovans had these big brains as well, that that entailed that they used fire all the time because they cooked food. So they spent less time digesting processing food, which enabled them to have these big brains. But you're telling me that's perhaps not the case? No, I don't think that's necessary.

I mean, we know that fire does appear. relatively early in our evolution, but it does not become ubiquitous for a long time. I mean, you can live on uncooked food. Well, it's a bit more difficult. It's less efficient. But especially if you have, and Neanderthals seem to have, and Denise and I just don't understand enough yet about their diet, but Neanderthals in many cases had a diet very heavy in fats and meat and things. And so you get enough. energy out of that again it's you know it's tastier i think and also safer in some ways if you cook it because you you get rid of parasites but uh you know i mean you can eat i don't think that having like steak tartare or carpaccio is necessarily um less good than

a than a than a steak um or you know sushi or whatever else right right right i meant more like Maybe it goes back to my schooling yet again, but they taught us that cooking food is a necessary step for us to develop these big brains in the first place. That's why I thought... This has been proposed, but I don't think it's fully convincing because... I see. It's just a theory. Because after large brains start, you have many sites where there's just no evidence for fire. And of course, it can be taphonomic. Things like ash can be washed away or charcoal. But I think it's likely that there are just situations where you just don't need to use fire and you can have a big brain. You mentioned that at the new site

in China, that there was evidence of some sort of different specialized type of hunting that Denisovans did. Do we know any more about that? I'd have to look at the paper again. But I think that what they also had is that, you know, they could show that Denisovans selected specific individuals, you know, certain age classes of the animals. I mean, though it is in Neanderthals, you know, where we have lots of good data. And I think that, you know, Neanderthals and Denisovans are probably, you can probably see them as similar enough that, you know, assumptions about their behavior. Their general behavioral patterns, I think, can be transferred. And with Neanderthals, we see there are groups that are specialized,

you know, hunting certain animals. I mean, I've excavated a couple of times with colleagues in France at a site that's a reindeer hunting site. And there's just the remains of hundreds of reindeer there that were all killed. It seems to be a specific season of the year when the Neanderthals went there and hunted reindeer by this cliff and then butchered them on site. And then came back the next year or a few years later and did the same thing. So, you know, they probably had or, and again, you know, Neanderthals were around for a long time. They were around, you know, in a huge variety of environments. Depending on the environment, they behave differently.

But there were certainly Neanderthal groups that had like... mobility patterns where they moved all through the year into different areas and they did different things at different times of the year. You know, when the reindeer herds are migrating, they'd go there and they hunt them. And, you know, maybe later on there's whatever certain berries are in season and they'd go there and they collect those. Or if there's, you know, like the salmon are spawning, they probably went there and they eat the salmon out of the rivers.

I mean, that would be. the easiest huge amounts of biomass that you can access very easily. So there's a lot of similarity between Neanderthals and Denisovans. Does that mean that there's a bigger behavioral gap between Neanderthals and Denisovans on one side and then early humans or sapiens on the other side? Or they also shared some of the same behaviors and it's really hard to tell apart? We're not that special. I think, honestly, we're not that special after all. I mean, we see, you know, I think one of the fascinating things is that a lot of these behaviors that were assumed to be something that only modern humans did are more and more frequently. We just figure out that Neanderthals do that as well.

You know, and it comes down to like the use of pigments and paints and colors. you know, the use of ornaments. For a long time, it was assumed, you know, Neanderthals did not make ornaments. And then, you know, we discovered that there is this one technocomplex, the Chateau Perronian from France, where Neanderthals seem to be making lots of like various pendants out of animal teeth.

We have evidence from several sites that they are using the claws and feathers of large raptors, like eagles or something similar, also probably as ornaments. You know, they make tools of bones. I mean, most of these things that we assume to be modern human only seem to be present in Neanderthals as well. I have a one -year -old child, and one thing that blows me away watching him grow up is that even at this very tender age, he already has a sense of humor. He's doing his little pranks and then laughs at them and wants me to laugh at them too, which I'm guessing speaks... to the incredibly important evolutionary function of people laughing together and bonding that way if it happens this early, you know? In other

words, do you think that Denisovans had a sense of humor and could crack a joke as well? Again, you know, I think, to me, exactly as you said, because it's such a basic thing in humans, I would assume yes. But it's, again, it's very hard, very hard to test. There's actually, there's a... A couple of psychologists who looked at Neanderthal cognition and they published a paper about 20 years ago where they claimed that they tried to reconstruct Neanderthal humor. And their claim was that Neanderthals would not understand puns or wordplay, but would be mostly like more physical comedy, like slapstick. And it's like, honestly, I'm sorry, this is not, it's not serious.

You cannot actually tell this. This is just. you know, you're making this up. But I would expect that they had some kind of humor. I mean, you know, some of our pets can be surprisingly mischievous, where I think, you know, they do think that they are playing pranks on us. And of course, you know, we probably... We look at it from a human perspective, and so we just assume that this is humor, even though they just do it because they think that they'll get a treat after or whatever, or that we find it cute. But yes, I would expect that Neanderthals and Denisovans also had some kind of sense of humor. But how exactly that looked, hard to tell today, unless we have time machines and we can go back and

watch them. Yeah, play pranks on each other in Denisovan cave. It's going to be hard to show. So Neanderthals were like stockier, kind of stronger than us, as we said at the beginning. Hence my poor joke about having a Neanderthal friend to open a tricky jar. It's just something our minds go to when somebody mentions Neanderthals. You told me that Denisovans were probably much the same that way, even bigger. Did they have any other like defining traits? I mean, that we can be certain of? Or am I like keep pushing you to speculate on things that we just can't say at this moment? I mean, you know, one of the things that is interesting about Denisovans is they seem to have big weird teeth. That's the

one thing that is frequent. That's one that's relatively easy to tell. The other thing also, in many cases, it seems like they don't have third molars. They don't have wisdom teeth. So, you know, in modern humans you have... two incisors, a canine, two premolars, and then three molars. And in Denisements, there only seem to be two molars. And maybe these relatively large molars that we see in them are simply in kind of, you know, you get in two molars, you get the same surface area as you would in three otherwise.

Maybe that's, but that is one of the things that we find as well. Really in their body shape, it's very hard to tell. I mean, you know, There is one partial skeleton from China that could also be a Denisovan potentially. So, you know, once we have more data on that, that might be helpful. But until then, it's just, it's very hard. Why would they have these freakishly big teeth? Can we surmise anything from that? No idea. I mean, you know, people wasted about 50 years trying to figure out why certain weird traits we see in Neanderthals are around. And I think today most of us realize that there is no evolutionary explanation for it. It's not selection or anything. Sorry, can you give me a couple of examples? What do you mean by like

weird? Yeah, for example, if you look at Neanderthal incisors, they have what we call shovel -shaped incisors. Their incisors are kind of curved. They have these ridges on the inside towards the side of your tongue. Or, you know, some of their lower premolars have a weird shape they have on the back of their head. They have kind of an oval depression, which is called supra Aeneic fossa, which is very diagnostic for Neanderthals.

And honestly, there's no clear explanation, like what's the point of that? And I think most scientists today think that all of this is simply due to random, what we call genetic drift, random effects. Neanderthals lived in such small populations that natural selection played a much smaller role than... kind of random effects. You know, having this depression on the back of your skull was not a disadvantage. And so, you know, it arose and it randomly just became fixed. It became very frequent in the population. And, you know, and people spent so much time. There's so many papers looking at this thing and trying to figure out why it's there. And I honestly think it's just random. It's just, you know, there were

so few Neanderthals around that genetic drift played a huge role. And maybe the same thing is true for Denisovans. Who knows? So evolution is like, if it doesn't hurt, you can keep it. No biggie. Yeah, exactly. In many cases. You know, I think that, you know, people think about evolution very much in this, in the way we learn it in school, which is completely true. But a lot of these... Natural selection works well when you have large populations. It works perfectly in bacteria. You see very quickly in bacteria that they develop things like resistance to antibiotics.

Because there's tons and tons of bacteria. But the thing is, Neanderthals, for example, there were very few of them. It's very hard to put an exact number down of how many Neanderthals were around at any given time. But I think that we're probably looking at less than 100 ,000. And, you know, this is in a space from like Portugal to Siberia. It could be as low as 30 ,000 or even 10 ,000 individuals. And so when you have so few individuals, the likelihood of traits being passed on really just depends on luck and not so much on selection. Of course, you know, if you have a Neanderthal that suddenly has only one leg, you know, again, not a biological thing, but, you know, or... you know, or would be unable

to see anything, you know, that would be a disadvantage and that would be selected against. But if it's just something weird, like, you know, slightly weird looking teeth, it doesn't matter. It could easily become fixed and remain around. Why were there so few Neanderthals? in total out there. I never heard about this before. Was it because of what you talked about before that they were usually forming these really tiny groups and didn't have like genetic diversity? I mean, that's definitely part of it. Another thing might be simply that they, in the end, they were like top -level carnivores, you know, like lions or hyenas. you know, as you go up in the food chain, you have less and less individuals of these species.

And probably the same is true for modern humans, you know, like modern humans, the ancestors of modern humans who were in Africa were also population sizes. I think a million is by far the highest that's even possible, but it's possible that it would be much less people across all of Africa. So this explosion in population size that we see is something very recent. And there's genetic methods that can look at this so -called partial sequential Markovian coalescent analyses, PSMCAs.

You can use these to... Yeah, no, I'm not. In the end, what you do is you kind of chop the genome up into little pieces. the genome of many individuals. And then for each of those little pieces, you calculate the time of the last common ancestor for all these individuals. And by looking at the distribution of the ages of the common ancestors, and this is extremely simplified, you can kind of reconstruct the changes in population size over time. And so we can actually see, for example, in Neanderthals and Denisovans that they were part of our of our population, like the common ancestors of modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, who are relatively diverse and large population. And then you see that Neanderthals

and Denisovans nosedive around the time when they leave Africa. They go through a bottleneck. And then we see the same in the modern humans who leave Africa, you know, about 100 ,000 years ago or so, we have the so -called out of Africa bottleneck, which is one of the kind of strongest effects in all genetic analyses that we look at today. People outside of Africa have much less genetic variability than the people who stayed in Africa. We're just a subset of the African genetic variability. But at least the people who left Africa in the last about 10 ,000 years with the increasing population size also increased their genetic variability. Neanderthals and Denisovans never did that. What we see in

these Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes is they go down to very, very low levels and then stay there for a long time. indicating that, you know, these were just very small populations. So it means that much like the Neanderthals, Denisovan numbers were also relatively small. I mean, you know, the problem is, of course, the only Denisovan genome that we have comes from Denisovan cave.

And, you know, Denisovan cave was probably, even though we named them Denisovans, was probably the periphery of Denisovan distribution. It's about as far northwest as they got. I think that probably there were many more Denisovans in like Southeast Asia and so on, but probably they didn't exchange much DNA with the guys up in Siberia.

You know, the distances are large and you have huge mountain ranges in between and deserts. And it's just hard to, even today, it's hard to get from whatever Laos to Siberia. But if you have to do all of this on foot, it's a little more difficult. From the perspective of Denisovans, what can we say for sure about the nature of their contact with other hominins? Would they be mainly interbreeding? Would they be killing each other, perhaps exchanging knowledge in some way? Or would they probably just be avoiding each other, like you outlined with those 13 Neanderthals that would probably be frightened even of other Neanderthals? I mean, you know, we know that they met. So the, you know, the clearest evidence

for contacts between Denisovans and other groups, I mean, besides the Denisovan DNA that we see in present -day populations, is this individual called Denny, Denisova 11 from Denisova Cave. The 13 -year -old girl, right? No, no, no. That's Denisova III. That's the finger bone. Deni is this tiny sliver of bone that had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. So, I mean, you know, the individual from whom this tiny sliver of bone comes had a Neanderthal mom and a Denisovan father. And so, you know, with this, we can show that somewhere in the area around Denisova cave, these two groups met and interbred. The problem is, of course, you know, we can't really tell whether this was this Neanderthal group into

which a Denisovan male came in and lived with them. Or was it the other way around? Was it the Denisovan group where a Neanderthal woman lived and bore a child? Or was this something completely different? You know, maybe it was, you know, you had the weird guys living on the other side of the mountain and kind of Romeo and Juliet style, you know, two young kids went out into the forest and, you know, whatever, looking for berries and meth there. Or, you know, it could also be something that was much darker, you know, and something non -consensual. So we have no idea how these things happened. But we know that there's at least one individual there who carried both, you know, who had a Neanderthal

and a Denisovan parent. And what's even more interesting is that we found out that the... father of this individual, came from a population of Denisovans that already met Neanderthals in the past because he had in his genome tiny little pieces of DNA that came from Neanderthals already. And we tried to calculate when that happened and it happened maybe 10 to 15 ,000 years earlier.

But, you know, clearly these two groups met and interacted. I would also assume, you know, when they meet that there would be some kind of cultural exchange. They might, you know, trade. They might try to communicate, but this is very, it's very hard to show. I mean, even in the case of modern humans and Neanderthals, where we have much, much more data, you know, where we have really lots and lots of archaeological sites with lots of material from Europe. This is something that's been discussed very controversially for the last, what, 40 years or so? You know, how context between Neanderthals and modern humans looked. Because we see European Neanderthals about... 40 ,000 years ago, seemed to show some changes in their

behavior. They suddenly have more ornaments and art and similar things than before. And one of the questions is, is this something they learned from modern humans? And it doesn't seem so because some of these ornaments actually show up before modern humans showed up in the region. But one of the ideas that was proposed by Nick Conard and colleagues was that maybe Neanderthals and modern humans, when they interacted or when they met, this kind of motivated them to kind of make themselves more distinct, to kind of have cultural identifiers, wear ornaments, kind of to show which group they come from. You know, in a way like, you know, you have today and in popular culture, you have you have different groups,

you have whatever the Goths who wear, you know, black clothes and whatever to kind of signify that they belong to this subculture. Maybe Neanderthals did the same. You know, we wear these eagle feathers to or these claws to show that we are this group. And modern humans used a certain kind of paint. I mean, hard to tell. But, you know, people always want to kind of show that they are something special and distinct. And maybe these contacts led to that being more important. That's a very funny image, like a big American high school.

You have like the jocks and Neanderthals and you have like the nerds. Kind of sweet. By the way, I wanted to ask the following. We don't have a lot of Denisovan remains. And yet this one. finger bone fragment or bone or whatever that we do have is immediately from a person that was half Denisovan, half Neanderthal. Wouldn't that entail that interbreeding was much more common than we think? I mean, yes, that's kind of what it would. Kind of like common sense logic that I'm applying here. Not exactly anthropologist's gentle deduction. No, no, I mean, that's exactly the kind of the fascinating thing that we see is that I mean, it's the same with Neanderthals and modern humans. I mean, we have an individual

from Romania, from a site called Oase, who has a Neanderthal great -great -grandmother or father. You know, it's a modern human otherwise, but it has, like within like five or six generations, it has a Neanderthal ancestor. And so, you know, that would kind of indicate that this happens all the time. But actually, if you look in modern human DNA, it doesn't seem to be present so much.

And also, you know, if Neanderthals and Denisovans constantly interbred, we would not see them as genetically distinct populations, but we do. So there are several possible explanations. I mean, one of them might be that when this interbreeding happens, these individuals who are hybrids, you know, like Denny, they would have lived with one of the parental populations and kind of bred back to one side. So, you know, for example, Danny would have then only, and his descendants, would have only mixed with Neanderthals, meaning that over time, this Denisovan contribution would have disappeared. Another option is that there's some kind of selection against, that actually these hybrids were less viable. than the non

hybrids. Maybe these, you know, in some ways the Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA were not completely compatible and being a hybrid or a descendant of a hybrid was a disadvantage. We're, you know, we're still trying to figure out these things. But I think that there's several possible explanations for it. It's fascinating though that we, you know, we accidentally found an individual who's really direct evidence for these two groups meeting.

I mean, when Vivian Sloan, who worked on this sliver of bone on Denisova 11, when she told me, I found it absolutely mind -blowing. I was like, how is this possible? How can we be so lucky that we find exactly this one piece? So I gather from your surprise there that it was less possible to have some sort of like a diverse multicultural posse. comprised of a couple of Neanderthals and a couple of Denisovans and some homo sapiens thrown in there for good measure that would hunt and live and chill together.

Yeah. I mean, we didn't. We didn't think so. But, you know, maybe we're wrong. You know, maybe it is like in the Lord of the Rings that, you know, you have the elves and the hobbits going out and doing good together. Maybe. Another mind boggling thing is the following. You keep telling me these populations are bumping into each other.

But you also told me there were very few in numbers living on this vast planet. How is that possible? Like, how is it possible that these people are even meeting in the first place? You know, like Asia is huge. Europe is really big. Like you said, from, I don't know, Siberia to Portugal. And we find these populations everywhere. And yet they keep kind of... They don't have cities and stuff. Like what's going on there? But I think, you know, they probably use similar resources.

You know, I think they have similar ideas of what is the kind of environment they want to be in. You know, and again, you know, our view is always biased towards caves because that's where often these remains. survive. But if you have a large dry cave that faces south, so it's probably warm most of the year, and it has a really good view across the landscape, then that would be an obvious place to live around there.

And, you know, you would not live in the swamps down by the river. And similarly, you know, if you follow the wandering, like the migrating herds of animals, you know, you are kind of drawn into the same directions. And I think finally, you know, we have to keep in mind the immensity of time. You know, Neanderthals were around for 300 ,000 years. And even if there were very few people at any one time, you know, these very few people, even if they only bump into modern humans once they get into the same area, every hundred years or every thousand years, that's enough to leave genetic traces. Same with Neanderthals and Denisovans. As a pin anthropologist, one of the things you really have to wrap your head

around is how immense the time spans are that we talk about here. The accuracy of our dating methods are very limited as we go back. C14 dates are probably the most accurate, but if you go back close to 50 ,000 years, you probably have a 2 ,000 or 3 ,000 year inaccuracy in your C14 dates. And, you know, if you have two individuals that to you seem contemporary, but are 2000 years apart, you know, that's a bit of an issue. It's like, you know, me and Julius Caesar, it's we're contemporaries, but it's not like we're hanging out on the weekends. That's a very good comparison.

Also, yeah, I had some Roman historians on the podcast. You would probably wouldn't want to chill with that guy. Generally speaking, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but modern Asians. have more Denisovan and Neanderthal DNA than, let's say, Europeans or people from Sub -Saharan Africa, right? Does that add any sort of like piece to the mosaic of this story of the Denisovans?

Yeah, I mean, so in general, the Neanderthal ancestry is pretty similar in Europeans, Asians, and everyone outside of Africa has roughly the same amount of Neanderthal ancestry. Asians have maybe a tiny bit more, but it's... It's not 100 % clear. It's pretty clear that everyone has more than African populations. And that's simply because, you know, our ancestors met Neanderthals once they left Africa. And there has been some back migration into Africa that carried back a little bit of Neanderthal DNA. But those are only small amounts. Now, the Nisovan ancestry is something we don't see in Europe at all. And Asian populations have a bit, like 0 .1, 0 .2%.

as compared to 1 % to 1 .5 % of Neanderthal DNA, so significantly less than Neanderthal DNA. What's really interesting, though, is that you have indigenous groups in the Philippines, for example, who have very large amounts of Denisovan DNA, maybe around 5 % or so, so several times what they have of Neanderthals. And similarly, populations in Papua New Guinea. And Australian Aborigines, so Melanesian groups, also have relatively high amounts of Denisovan ancestry, much more than Neanderthal, again, 3 % to 5%. So, you know, it seems to be present in these different populations.

And the big question is, what does it actually mean? You know, what does it mean to have whatever 1 % of Neanderthal DNA or 0 .1 % of Denisovan DNA? Is that something that we should just ignore? Because, you know, it's like thousands of our genome. Who cares? And so there's a lot of really interesting research looking into the effects of these, what we call archaically introgressed segments. So portions of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA in our genomes and what they actually do.

And so probably the most fascinating one of these is with regards to Denisovan ancestry in Tibet. So Tibetan populations today, you know, live at high altitudes. In general, if you look at Tibetans, they are genetically quite similar to Han Chinese. And so across their whole genome, you have about 0 .1 % of Denisovan DNA. And that means that there's like tiny little chunks in their genome, more or less randomly distributed.

And if you compare two or three individuals, they don't have exactly the same Denisovan genomes. They're all different Denisovan fragments. They're all different little pieces of Denisovan DNA floating around in their genomes. But because Tibetans live at high altitudes, they had to adapt to this. At high altitudes, you have a lack of oxygen. And there's especially one gene, IPES1, which is a hypoxia pathway gene. It's a gene that helps people to deal better with low amounts of oxygen. And especially what we found is there's one variant of this gene. This is work by Emilia Huerta Sanchez and her colleagues.

they found that there's one genetic variant in Tibetans that leads to women having larger babies. Like the birth weight of these babies is larger by whatever, 100 grams or so, which you think like, oh, that's bad. It's harder, bigger baby, harder to give birth. But large babies are a very good predictor of infant survival. Larger babies are much more likely to survive. And this is because, you know, these babies just get more blood and oxygen while they're developing in the womb. Now, the fascinating thing is if you look at this genetic variant that's responsible for this haplotype, the variant you see in Tibetans is not present in any other modern human population.

It's actually very far away. Like most modern human populations have, you know, variants that are like close together. There's like one or two or three differences between them. This one is like 40 differences, like 40 changes from the closest modern human variant. But surprisingly, the variant we see in the Denisovan genome is very close to it. So this is very similar to the variant seen in Denisovans. And so the idea is that the ancestors of Tibetans picked up this genetic variant or something similar to it from Denisovans. And in the beginning, while they were at low altitudes, this was at a frequency of 0 .1%, because it was kind of randomly distributed in their genome. But today, it's present in 80

% of Tibetans. So it's been selected for extremely strongly. As they move to high altitudes, suddenly, you know, having bigger babies, despite the lack of oxygen, was a huge advantage. And so this was published in 2014 or 15, I think. And so based on this, the authors predicted maybe Denisovans were adapted to high altitudes. And at this time, the only Denisovans we had were from Denisovak Cave. And Denisovak Cave is 750 meters above sea level, so it's not a high altitude site.

But then in 2020, this mandible from Baishiya Karst Cave in Tibet came out from 3 ,700 meters altitude, showing that yes, Denisovans were actually there at really high altitudes. And up until then, the assumption was that nobody lived at these high altitudes until maybe like 20 ,000 years ago. And this mandible is whatever, 180 ,000, 160 ,000 years old. So much, much older than we thought. And again, it's proof that the Nismans could also deal with these high altitudes.

And this is what made it possible for present day Tibetans to also live up there, which is really cool. That is fascinating. What we can say for certain is, besides their freakishly big teeth, they also had mega -chonker babies. Probably. What can you tell us about the demise of the Nusavans? Again, I'm probably going to have to twist your arms to speculate away, but you must have some hypothesis about what happened.

Actually, not really. I mean, you know, we have no idea what happened. I mean, you know, I would assume that it probably was also linked to climatic events that happened around that time. I mean, you know, we assume that Nice has probably also disappeared somewhere between 50 and 30 ,000 years ago, but we can't be 100 % sure. This is the time when modern humans show up in East Asia and Southeast Asia, in Northern Asia as well, like the earliest. fossil from northern asia from siberia is about 45 000 years old from china the earliest modern human is also in the range of maybe a bit over 40 000 southeast asia there's actually slightly older maybe even 50 or 55 000 years old modern humans um you know one one possibility

would be that the modern humans just came in with large populations there were just more of them and so the denisovans were either out -competed or just were mixed into these, you know, modern human population. And they became part of it. And as they just bred with modern humans from then on slowly, the Denisovan contribution became less and less. But in reality, of course, we don't know. I mean, there are some really weird results. There's a couple of studies looking at the genetics of top ones that found... very, very late introgression. So very late interbreeding with Denisovans, maybe in the range of 20 ,000 years, which to me is rather mind -boggling because 20 ,000 years ago, the ancestors of Papuans were

already in Papua New Guinea. So this would mean that Denisovans would have been there as well. And there's absolutely no archaeological evidence for that up until now. So, you know, hard to tell. But a very interesting question. And, you know, of course, that's also the people who migrated to Papua New Guinea kind of had to move through Flores and potentially would have met there also the last Homo floresiensis, the last hobbits.

I'm very curious how the interactions would have looked and whether there were any. But without DNA, it's going to be very hard to tell. So given what we've discussed, at the very beginning of this conversation, I guess that it's completely within reason to expect that there might be even more undiscovered species of humans out there, right? Or of ancestors or relatives whose remains we just simply haven't stumbled on yet. Yes, I think, you know, I think that's pretty clear.

You know, we've, in the last few years, I mean, we just had, even if we just look at the stuff that's very recent, you know, we had... Floresiensis on Flores, Lusonensis in the Philippines. We have Denisovans. We have Homo naledi in South Africa, you know, dating to 300 ,000 years ago. There's just lots of stuff. It's possible that in Africa, we actually have more than one species.

You know, the fossil record outside of East and South Africa is very limited. And so, you know, who knows what was going on in West Africa? Were there hominins there? It's likely, but... but we don't know who they are. And the problem is, you know, using only morphology, it's going to be always very hard to show these things like gene flow. There are some people who work on this. Becky Ackerman from Cape Town has published a series of papers looking at kind of morphological indicators of interbreeding. So maybe using some of those methods, we can figure out something, but otherwise we just have to wait for... technology to advance and for some fossils to show up that actually preserve DNA that allow us to look at

these questions. Professor, what's mind -boggling to me is that we're still here. All of these groups have died out and yet we're still here and we're just as susceptible to climate shocks. I don't know if this is true, but I read somewhere that at a certain point there was like a thousand or two thousand or a couple of thousand humans left. on Earth. We almost died out as well. But it didn't happen. Is it pure chance? Is it that we are a little bit exceptional at the end, nevertheless?

Or is it something else that we've missed during this conversation? No, I mean, chance definitely plays a role in it. I mean, we know that there were modern human populations that disappeared. we have this individual from Ustishim, from Siberia, this 45 ,000 -year -old modern human. We have a complete genome from this individual. And what's fascinating is that this individual has no living descendants. So this is a population that colonized Northern Asia 45 ,000 years ago, but then just completely disappeared. Same with some of the fossils we have from Europe. Some of the earliest modern humans in Europe are not related to any later populations. These were groups that likely colonized these areas. And then due to most likely,

you know, changes in the climate and in the environment disappeared. You know, Siberia is a relatively marginal environment, even during warm periods. And if it suddenly gets much colder, you're pretty screwed if you're up in... in central Siberia where Ustashim is. At the same time, one of the fascinating things we see in almost all of these modern humans is that they are genetically much more variable than Neanderthals or Denisovans.

They seem to have some kind of mechanisms to keep the genetic variability high. And these must be something cultural. I don't know whether these would be groups that meet up once a year or from time to time to exchange individuals. But there seem to be some mechanisms around that reduce this inbreeding that we see in Neanderthals and Denisovans. I mean, Neanderthals in some populations, at least, and the ones that we know genetically best in the Altai, this is... I mean, we have a Neanderthal from Denisova Cave that has parents that are either like half siblings or like grandparent, grandchild or like uncle, niece, aunt, nephew, something like this. Extremely closely related. And that's probably because

there just, you know, weren't other people around. As I said, you know, very, very shallow dating pool. And so modern humans seem to have had some mechanism to counteract this. And I assume that's something cultural, but we don't understand it sufficiently yet, I think. So maybe it all comes down to what we were talking about there in the middle about how people who look very different to us look very appealing to us. Maybe we just have more of that. Also, did we form bigger groups then? than Neanderthals or Denisovans? Is that fair to say? I don't think like that. Is that a cliche as well? Yeah, I think that's a bit of a cliche. I mean, you know, and again, like reconstructing group size is extremely difficult

in the past. But it seems to be generally, you know, more environmentally determined in hunter gatherers, for example. I think it depends a little bit on how productive the environment is, how large the groups are. And I would assume the same with Neanderthals and Denisovans, that in environments where, you know, you have lots and lots of food, lots of raw materials and resources, you'd have larger groups. And in areas that are more marginal, you'd have smaller groups. I don't think that's necessarily a modern human Neanderthal Denisovan difference. But again, it's very hard to study. Right. Yet another kind of... stereotype I had in mind. I thought this was our superpower, that we could form larger groups. We were always

taught that, that we're not the strongest, we're not the fastest, we're not the biggest, but we can form these bigger groups and bigger tribes and bands that Neanderthals and probably Denisovans couldn't. But you're telling me we're... Maybe these contexts were exactly that, that you have these small groups of 20, 25, 30, maybe 50 individuals, but because they come together, every few years into a group of 500 where they can then exchange individuals and does also genetics, you know, that would in some ways mean that you have this larger kind of virtual group. It's not like the permanent group, the people you're constantly with is just a small, but you have these larger social networks. I do think that these, you know,

these larger social networks definitely helped. A bit of a wild question at the end, Professor. If AI does become sentient, like many experts believe, including some I hosted on this show, thus making us obsolete, will we be the Denisovans of tomorrow? What do you think? I bet you weren't expecting that. I hope not. But, you know, who knows? I am a little bit worried. Mostly about the social effects of what could happen if lots and lots of people lose their jobs and get replaced by AI. That's going to be a very, very ugly thing.

And so I'm not so much worried that there's machines coming after us, but more that people just get very, very mad. And that's bad. People do horrible things to other people when they're mad. that could lead to very serious problems. I'd like to avoid that. A very reasonable take, Professor. Thank you so much. This was a very, very interesting conversation. I really enjoyed every second of it. Where can people follow your work? I guess you're too busy to have social media. Yes, I mean, I have some social media, but I don't really use it for scientific outreach. I try to, you know, I try to go and talk to podcasts or...

or journalists, I'm always happy to talk about my work, but I'm just not big on the social media thing. All right, cool. I really hope we get to do this again with more exciting findings on the Denisovans. Thanks again. Thank you. An absolute pleasure. Yeah, I really enjoyed it too. Thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe to the Smart Cookies podcast on YouTube.

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Thanks again.

The Fascinating Story Of Our Mysterious Relatives, The Denisovans, With Prof. Bence Viola

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