The Xiahe jawbone, found in Tibet and identified as Denisovan through protein analysis in 2019, provided the first physical evidence of Denisovans outside Siberia. The bone dates to at least 160,000 years ago and comes from an environment at over 3,000 meters elevation—cold, dry, and oxygen-poor. Its presence suggests that Denisovans occupied high-altitude environments much earlier than modern humans were thought to have done, which is consistent with the EPAS1 gene finding: Tibetans’ high-altitude adaptation came from Denisovan DNA precisely because Denisovans had been living at high altitude long enough to evolve adaptations to it.
Whether a Laotian fossil tooth, described from a cave in Laos, represents another Denisovan individual is under active investigation as of the mid-2020s. If confirmed, it would further extend the Denisovan geographic range and provide another piece of physical evidence for a population that has been, until recently, defined almost entirely by their genetic traces.
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## Neanderthal Range and the Question of Movement
The finding that Denisova 11’s mother was more closely related to Vindija Cave Neanderthals from Croatia than to the Neanderthals known from Denisova Cave opens a window onto the dynamics of Neanderthal population movement.
Neanderthals occupied an enormous geographic range for most of their existence: from the Atlantic coast of Portugal and Spain through France, Germany, and the rest of western and central Europe, through the Levant and the Middle East, and into Central Asia and as far east as the Altai Mountains and possibly further. This range is known from physical fossil finds, from stone tool assemblages associated with Neanderthal technology, and from the environmental conditions that Neanderthal adaptations suggest they could tolerate.