Between Denisovans and Homo Sapiens, Experts Debate on Who Settles Permanently on the Tibetan Plateau First

The Tibetan Plateau has long been thought to be one of the last areas on the planet to be colonized by people migrating throughout the world.

Our dead relatives, the Denisovans, reached the "top of the world" some 160,000 years ago-120,000 years earlier than prior estimates for our species-and even contributed to our adaptation to high altitude, according to a recent article by archeologists at the University of California, Davis.

As a framework for researchers, Zhang and Zhang present two scenarios of human habitation of the Tibetan Plateau that future discoveries might evaluate:

• Intermittent visits until staying there year-round around 9,000 years ago, towards the conclusion of the Ice Age.
• From 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, there has been continuous occupancy.

Denovisans might have transferred the EPAS1 haplotype to modern humans around 46,000 to 48,000 years ago in either scenario.

"The key question is whether they stay there all year," said Nicolas Zwyns, a UC Davis assistant professor of anthropology and the paper's supervising author, "which would suggest that they were biologically suited to hypoxia." "Or did they just happen to arrive up there and then withdraw back to the lowlands or simply vanish?"

Denisovans became extinct at an unknown time, but some researchers estimate it might have been as recently as 20,000 years ago. "Although we don't know if they were acclimated to high altitude," Zwyns explained, "the transmission of some of their genes to us will be the game changer thousands of years later for our species to become adapted to hypoxia." "That is a terrific narrative, in my opinion."

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