Local residents have called it Aju-Tasch—bear rock—for longer than the region has had written records. The name reflects the cave’s association with large animals rather than with human history. The more formal name, Denisova, honors a hermit named Denis, a Russian holy man who lived in the cave in the second half of the eighteenth century. He could not have known that he was occupying a site that had hosted human relatives for hundreds of thousands of years before him.
Russian archaeologists found evidence of Paleolithic occupation in the 1970s and began systematic excavation in the 1980s. The cave’s interior has three chambers—a main chamber, an east gallery, and a south gallery—connected by passages carved by water through the limestone bedrock over millions of years. The deposits inside contain roughly twenty stratigraphic layers, the deepest and oldest reaching back approximately 300,000 years. The youngest layers include medieval material and evidence of Denis himself.
For most of the twentieth century, Denisova Cave was recognized as significant but not extraordinary. Other Paleolithic sites in Siberia and Central Asia had produced tools and animal remains from similar time periods. The cave was interesting. It was not yet famous.
That changed in 2010.
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## The Discovery That Made the Cave Famous
In 2008, Russian archaeologists working in Denisova Cave’s East Gallery found a small bone from a finger—a distal phalanx, the outermost bone of a little finger, from a child estimated to be between five and seven years old. The bone came from deposits dating to approximately 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. Svante Pääbo’s team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig received a sample and extracted mitochondrial DNA.