Micro-CT scanning performed by Fiona Brock at Cranfield University revealed something about this particular fragment’s earlier history: its surface showed acid etching and pitting consistent with passage through a digestive system. The bone had, most likely, been eaten by a cave hyena or some other predator and passed through the animal’s gut before eventually being deposited in the cave sediment where it lay for the next ninety millennia. This detail—simultaneously mundane and profound—is part of why the fragment survived. Digestive passage can alter a bone’s surface while leaving its interior chemistry largely intact.
The fragment came from a long bone—an arm or a leg. Its cortical thickness, the measurement of the bone’s outer wall, indicated that the individual who grew this bone was at least thirteen years old when they died. Beyond that, the fragment revealed nothing about who this person was by appearance or behavior. There was no face, no skull, no teeth, no indication of how they died or how they lived. There was only the bone itself, and what the bone contained.
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## The Cave That Keeps Its Secrets
Denisova Cave sits in a landscape that has not changed fundamentally in the time since the people who left traces in its sediment were alive. The Altai Mountains of southern Siberia are remote even by the standards of a modern country that contains a great deal of remoteness. The cave lies in the valley of the Anuy River, about four kilometers from the village of Chyorny Anuy, at an elevation of roughly 600 meters above sea level.