The pace of discovery from this site has been remarkable by archaeological standards. The initial Denisovan genome published in 2010 came from a finger bone found in 2008. Denisova 11 was found in 2012 and genetically characterized in 2018. Additional hominin fragments have been identified through ZooMS screening in the years since the Denisova 11 paper, and at least some of them are undergoing or awaiting DNA analysis. The cave’s known hominin individuals now number in the dozens when all identified fragments are counted, though most are represented by very small amounts of material.
The chronological refinement of the cave’s layers, published in two major papers in 2019 in Nature, was itself a substantial achievement. Establishing precise dates for when different groups occupied the cave—and for how long the periods of Neanderthal and Denisovan overlap lasted—provides the context needed to interpret the genomic data. If Neanderthals and Denisovans overlapped in the cave for only a narrow window of time, the meeting that produced Denisova 11 becomes more temporally constrained. If the overlap was broad and the two populations were regularly present in the same region across tens of thousands of years, the encounter becomes less surprising and more representative of a sustained pattern.
The 2019 dating results suggested that Denisovans were present in the cave from at least 195,000 to 55,000 years ago, with some analyses pushing the earliest Denisovan occupation back to approximately 287,000 years ago. Neanderthals were present from approximately 193,000 to 97,000 years ago. The overlap period—when both groups had been using the cave in the relatively recent stratigraphic past, even if not simultaneously—spans many tens of thousands of years. Denisova 11’s estimated date of approximately 90,000 years ago falls squarely within this overlap period.