FTA: The Xiahe mandible is complete enough to now revisit the rich Chinese hominin fossil collection and identify other fossils as Denisovan, even without DNA evidence. I have no doubt that in the future the sequencing of ancient proteins will complement these morphological analyses.

But the most extraordinary aspect of our findings, in my opinion, is the demonstration that such archaic hominins could successfully live in this challenging high-altitude environment, more than 120,000 years before modern H. sapiens settled on the Tibetan Plateau. It seems that a gene variant that helps modern populations on the Tibetan Plateau to adapt to high-altitude hypoxia was inherited from these Denisovans.