In 2008, researchers searching for fossils in the Denisova cave in Siberia came across something interesting.

It appeared to be the bone from an ancient homidid species.

Subsequent DNA analysis on the bone has revolutionized everything we know about the origin of humanity.

Had this bone been discovered a few decades beforehand, we might never have known about it.

Learn more about the Denisovans, how we discovered them and how they affect humanity today on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Today human beings aka Homo sapiens, are the only hominid species on Earth.

Tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years ago, however, that was not the case.

We shared the planet with other hominid species which were closely related to humans.

Probably the best known hominid species is homo neanderthal.

The first neanderthal skeleton was found in 185656 and since then we found countless fossils and other evidence of their existence

The only other species of hominids that we found were far older going back many hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

There was a big gap in the fossil record between the last homo erectus, which appeared about 300,000 years ago, and Neanderthals.

We didn't know of any other homident species which existed in the last 100,000 years other than humans and Neanderthals.

In Siberia, there's a remote cave in the Altai Mountains.

Caves are usually good places to search for

fossils because they're protected from the elements. Some of the most significant

paleontology finds have been found in caves around the world. The Siberian cave

is known as the Denisova Cave. It is named

after an 18th century hermit known as Saint Dionysi which is the Russian word

for Dennis. The cave is unique in that the average temperature inside the cave is 0 degrees

Celsius or 32 degrees Fahrenheit. The cave had been explored in the early 1970s

and they found evidence of some early humans who had lived in the cave as well

as some Neanderthal artifacts.

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