The genome is a remarkable document. It is also a narrow one. It records ancestry with precision and population history with considerable power. What it does not record is the fullness of a person’s life, which is lost more completely than the bone itself.
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## What Comes Next in This Research
The field of ancient genomics continues to advance rapidly, and the questions opened by the Denisova 11 study are actively being pursued.
The most important outstanding question may be the geographic range of Denisovan populations and the timing and location of their encounters with modern humans. The available Denisovan genomes all come from a single site in Siberia. Comparing those genomes to the Denisovan ancestry in modern human populations from Southeast Asia and Oceania requires making inferences across a very large gap—inferring the properties of Denisovan populations in locations thousands of kilometers from the only place Denisovan bones have been found.
Finding additional Denisovan remains—or recovering ancient hominin DNA from sites in Southeast Asia—would dramatically improve this situation. The Xiahe jawbone from Tibet, while genetically informative at the protein level, has not yet yielded viable DNA for sequencing. Ancient sites in Southeast Asia and island Oceania that were occupied during the period of Denisovan-modern human contact would, if they preserved ancient DNA, have the potential to provide Denisovan genomes from populations more directly relevant to the admixture events that left a legacy in modern populations.
ZooMS screening of unanalyzed collections from Asian Paleolithic sites is ongoing. The success of the Denisova Cave screening, which found Denisova 11 among thousands of animal bone fragments, suggests that similar screening at other sites could yield additional hominin material. Some of that material, if from sites with favorable preservation conditions, might yield ancient DNA.