A Cave in Southern China Holds Denisovan Bones and a Long Record of Their Tools
Two companion papers published in Nature on Sept. 9, 2026, describe fossils, stone tools and animal bones from Bianfu Cave in Yunnan Province, southwestern China. The authors attribute the material to Denisovans, an extinct human group known until now mostly from teeth and small bone fragments.
The first paper says the group's tool-making and hunting have been poorly documented. The second paper focuses on anatomy: it says Denisovan remains from below the head are scarce and that no long bone with identifiable features had been described, adding that the Bianfu material gives direct information on the shape of the Denisovan forearm.
Qijun Ruan of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fahu Chen and colleagues report four teeth, two skull fragments and a radius, one of the forearm bones, from layers dated to about 167,000 to 134,000 years ago. Cultural material runs through the cave from roughly 190,000 to 70,000 years ago, which they call one of the longest such records most simply attributed to Denisovans.
The second paper accounts for three of those bones. Huiyun Rao, Qiaomei Fu and colleagues at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing sorted more than 60,000 bone fragments by shape, then ran a small selection through protein analysis. That identified two skull fragments and a piece from the upper end of a radius, and confirmed them, with two teeth from the excavation, as Denisovan. Bianfu Cave now yields the most abundant Denisovan remains outside Denisova Cave in Siberia, the authors write.
Pollen and animal remains place the site in conifer forest or forest-steppe, Ruan and colleagues report. They describe specialized hunting of medium- to large-bodied prey, stone tools struck from cores with little further shaping, and constant use of bone that was never worked at all. The authors take that as a preference for using objects as found over making them.
Both identifications rest on the shape of the teeth at the boundary between enamel and dentine, and on ancient protein sequences.
