The bone was also digested—passed through a predator’s gut—before being deposited. This is unusual for a bone that yielded good-quality DNA: digestive processes are not gentle to organic molecules. But the fact that the bone ended up in the cave’s protected sediment, rather than being scattered or destroyed elsewhere, was necessary for its preservation. Whatever predator consumed it and deposited it in the cave sediment was, in a sense, part of the chain of causation that led to the 2018 discovery.
None of this was planned. The preservation of the Denisova 11 bone was the product of a particular combination of circumstances—the physical properties of the cave, the geological stability of the Altai region, the accident of where the bone ended up within the cave—that could easily have been different. If the cave’s temperature had been a few degrees warmer, or the moisture conditions less favorable, or the specific layer of deposit less well-sealed, the DNA might have degraded beyond recovery thousands of years ago.
The people who were not at Denisova Cave, who did not end up in protective sediment, whose bones degraded in open-air sites or in less favorable cave environments—those people are permanently beyond the reach of ancient genomics as it currently exists. They may have had equally interesting ancestries, or more interesting ones. They simply did not leave evidence that survives.
Denisova 11 is not necessarily representative of the people and the encounters that characterized her time. She is representative of what survival through 90,000 years of geological time makes visible. That is a different, and narrower, category.