Not All Early East Asians Met Denisovans: MPI Maps 40,000 Years of Denisovan Ancestry

An international team led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has scanned more than a hundred ancient Eurasian human genomes for surviving fragments of Denisovan DNA, reconstructing how Denisovan ancestry shifted across space and time over the past 40,000 years. The underlying paper appeared online in Current Biology on 20 October 2025, with the Max Planck Society issuing its research news on 4 November.

The study, led by Jiaqi Yang, Stéphane Peyrégne and Benjamin M. Peter and involving Qiaomei Fu, finds that China’s Tianyuan individual, dating to roughly 40,000 years ago, carried the highest known proportion of Denisovan ancestry—above 0.2%. That proportion was steadily diluted in later populations, indicating that mixing between early East Asians and Denisovans was not a single, uniform event.

Strikingly, the J&omacron;mon–Ryukyu lineage that later contributed genetically to modern Japanese people carried the lowest Denisovan ancestry of all. The researchers infer that this ancestral branch dispersed toward the Far East along a route on which it almost never encountered Denisovans.

The authors argue that anatomically modern humans entered East Asia along more than one path, with differing patterns of contact. The very presence or absence of Denisovan ancestry, they suggest, serves as a genetic map of ancient migrations.

Source: Jiaqi Yang et al. Max-Planck-Gesellschaft research news (original paper Current Biology, 2025-10-20), 2025-11-04.