Viviane Slon was named one of Nature’s ten people who mattered in 2018, recognizing her leadership of the study. The recognition reflected both the scientific significance of the finding and the methodological achievement of extracting reliable conclusions from such a challenging sample.
Subsequent research has deepened the context for Denisova 11 without revising its central finding. Studies of Denisova Cave’s chronology published in 2019 provided more precise dating of the cave’s layers. Ongoing ZooMS screening has continued to identify additional hominin fragments. Research on Denisovan DNA in modern human populations has expanded the understanding of Denisovan geographic range and the timing and location of their encounters with modern humans.
The field of ancient genomics has continued to develop rapidly. Methods have improved, costs have fallen, and the scope of research has expanded to include individuals and populations from more periods and more regions. The achievements of the Denisova Cave research—the Neanderthal genome, the Denisovan discovery, Denisova 11—remain among the field’s most significant contributions, benchmarks against which later work is implicitly measured.
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## The Bone’s Journey
There is something worth pausing on in the physical history of the bone itself. It was part of a person—an arm or leg, probably—ninety thousand years ago. Something ate the bone, or the whole body, and the fragment passed through the animal’s digestive system. It was deposited in the cave’s sediment, in what would become layer 12 of the East Gallery. It lay there through the end of the last interglacial period, through the beginning of the last glacial maximum, through the entire recorded history of human civilization, through every generation of people alive today and every generation of their ancestors.