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In 2025, researchers finally solved the identity of a mysterious 146,000-year-old skull that had been hidden in a Chinese well for decades before its 2018 discovery.
The Harbin skull sat unidentified for decades after a well digger found it and hid it away, before it finally surfaced in 2018. In 2025, researchers extracted ancient proteins and mitochondrial DNA from the skull's dense petrous bone and hardened dental plaque, and the genetic signatures matched known Denisovan material, finally putting a face to a human relative previously known mostly from a handful of fragmentary bones found in Siberia and Tibet.
Neanderthals are a much better-studied relative with plenty of skeletal remains already identified, and Homo erectus lived far earlier and looked notably different, so neither matched the Harbin skull's genetic profile.
Scientists nicknamed 2025 'the year of the Denisovan' because this identification arrived alongside several other discoveries that, together, finally clarified what this elusive human cousin actually looked like and how widely it once ranged across Asia.
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