I read a book about Denisovans this week in the book:
It book was not bad, buy not as exciting as Cave of Bones: A True Story of Discovery, Adventure, and Human Origins about discovering Homo naledi. A different kind of a book, more of a general story/history of what we know.
Anyway, I took away two interesting titbits.
The first is that they were concurrent with Neanderthals. This helped sort out the timeline for me. They interbed with us (Sapiens) and Neanderthals, so really were they another species?
And the second is that there were perhaps two (or many) populations, a north and southern Eurasian/Asian populations. And they were separated enough to differentiate somewhat, e.g. stout and tougher in the colder north and longer-limbed in the warmer south.
Fascinating stuff!
It brought up a lot of memories of reading evolutionary biology/population ecology books in grad school and learning about methods of speciation. I loved that stuff.
There was also mention of the much lower sea level around Asia/Indonesia. A lot of their bones/dwellings are probably underwater. A Chinese fishermen even found some Denisovans bones, dredged up a mandible (or something) from memory (ah yes, this one). Underwater archaeology/palaeontology is way harder! Near impossible?
There was also mention of an impact event in southern Asia that helped scatter the populations of hominids, perhaps 700-800k years ago, but they still cannot locate the impact crater, only the effects of the impact on rock.
The wiki pages on all this are great! The amazing times we live in!