I had long suspected that Denisovans represented a substantial portion of the already-known Chinese fossil record; they just hadn’t been identified. The Xiahe jaw, we hoped, could bridge the gap. The Xiahe mandible is complete enough to now revisit the rich Chinese hominin fossil collection and identify other fossils as Denisovan, even without DNA evidence. I have no doubt that in the future the sequencing of ancient proteins will complement these morphological analyses. But the most extraordinary aspect of our findings is the demonstration that such archaic hominins could successfully live in this challenging high-altitude environment, more than 120 ka before modern H. sapiens settled on the Tibetan Plateau. It seems that a gene variant that helps modern populations on the Tibetan Plateau to adapt to high-altitude hypoxia was inherited from these Denisovans.

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