Questionable Categories of Human Ancestors: The Denisovans

What happens when you derive a whole people group from a fingerbone? Confusion and every evil work.

Evolutionists have long tended to subdivide people into races, tribes, and species. Diversity is good, but it can lead to discrimination, as when early Belgian imperialists arbitrarily divided African tribes in modern-day Rwanda into “Hutus” and “Tutsis.” When these groups of people began to see one another as different, despite their obvious similarities and intermarriages, conflict developed, eventually leading to the Rwanda genocide in 1994. In that horrible 100 days, nearly a million people were slaughtered—brother against brother (ThoughtCo). Would it not have been better to emphasize their similarities as fellow Homo sapiens, and treat one another based on character and merit?

A more modern depiction shows Neanderthals as strong, intelligent and culturally astute. What’s the difference? image by Mauro Cutrona.

We have seen increasing changes of heart among paleoanthropologists about Neanderthals. Evolutionists are finally coming around to believing they were our essentially the same as us (example in Live Science). If contemporaneous “modern humans” saw them as people enough to intermarry with them, who are we to call them a different species? In hindsight, has the term “Neanderthal man” provided useful knowledge? No; it has given Neanderthals an undeserved bad reputation for well over a century. Now evolutionists are doing it with another category, “Denisovans.”

Talk about building a mountain out of a molehill! The “Denisovan” category is based on a fingerbone from one cave. From genetic analysis of this tiny bone, evolutionary anthropologists built a saga of early man migrating farther east than expected. They were “other” than us. They were “other” than Neanderthals. There was just one problem: all three groups interbred. They all treated each other as worthy mates. Eager to find “transitional forms” in which to stuff into their preconceptions, evolutionists are guilty of historical racism.

New Scientist just announced, “We may have bred with Denisovans much more recently than we thought.” Notice the Tontological form of the sentence: who’s “we” you ask, if not mistaken evolutionists? Would you have thought that? Hearing about the fact of interbreeding, you most likely would never have thought that, unless the term “Denisovans” suggested to you that those people were “other” than human. Now, having committed another Darwinian blunder in taxonomy, evolutionary anthropologists are having to backtrack about their latest blunder of historical racism. Watch the saga unravel, as their slippery fingers cling to their fake categories:

Our species may have been interbreeding with Denisovans as recently as 15,000 years ago, according to a detailed analysis of the DNA of people living in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

We already know that, after Homo sapiens first migrated out of Africa, our species repeatedly interbred with a number of now-extinct hominin species, including the Neanderthals and Denisovans. The signs are in our DNA today – all people of non-African descent carry some Neanderthal DNA, while some Asian people also have Denisovan DNA.

Not much is known about the mysterious Denisovans. Their only physical remnants discovered so far are a few teeth and fragments of bone unearthed in a cave in Siberia.

This is a shocking revelation. The old story, as with the saga of Neanderthal man, is that “hominin” Denisovans had a few trysts with Homo sapiens (i.e., “us” moderns) about 50,000 years ago, then went extinct. Now, this abrupt about face leads to another shocking possibility: Denisovans could be living among us today!

Cox doesn’t think any last remaining Denisovans could still be hiding out on an island. “It’s isolated, but it still has too much contact for something like that not to be noticed.”

The new data also reveals ­considerable genetic diversity among the Denisovans – the group involved in the earlier Papua New Guinea interbreeding are almost as genetically different to a Denisovan bone found in Siberia as they are to the Neanderthals, a completely different branch of the hominin family tree.

Ann Gibbons at Science Magazine summarizes the finding this way. Notice the surprise:

The elusive Denisovans, the extinct cousins of Neanderthals, are known only from a handful of bones and teeth they left in Siberia’s Denisova Cave in Russia and the genetic legacy they bequeathed to living people across Asia. A new study of that legacy in people from New Guinea now suggests that, far from being a single group, these mysterious humans were so diverse that their populations were as distantly related to each other as they were to Neanderthals. In another startling suggestion, the study implies that one of those groups may have survived and encountered modern humans as recently as 15,000 to 30,000 years ago—tens of thousands of years later than researchers had thought.

Cue sound of the old story they were telling us crashing down. Evolutionists are finding it hard to give up on their assumptions. Substitute “Hutus” and “Tutsis” for these arbitrary people groups, and the racist overtones become obvious. Denisovans were people. Their genetic diversity was sufficiently high that classification under this arbitrary name borrowed from a Siberian cave loses all meaning. At the margins, who’s in and who’s out? One doesn’t marry animals; all these “hominins” interacted and interbred because they saw each other as the same type of being: able to communicate, able to understand one another, able to love.

Fake science finds differences where there are none. At the end of the article, the evolutionists are bragging about their knowledge. “But look at how our knowledge has exploded over the past nine years from a tiny fragment of finger bone.” But right before that, the same braggart admits, “The fragment is small, and raises more questions than it answers.”

Well, it’s about time to “raise more questions” against the historical racists who have gotten their “knowledge” so wrong for so long. “Look at how our knowledge has exploded,” boasts anthropologist Bence Viola.  In one sense, he got that right!

Exercise: Consider how evolutionary paleoanthropologists might concoct evolutionary stories about Mountain Men and Crow Indians—including classifying them as different species—if they didn’t have written accounts of intermarriage and children born, but only had bones and pieces of genetic evidence. Make up a story that includes fake “knowledge” they might publish in scientific journals about them. Sprinkle in some historical racism to illustrate what they are doing now with the Denisovan and Neanderthal fake categories.

Further reading:

Neil Savage, “Scientists in Germany identify first hybrid hominin,” Nature 27 March 2019. A Denisovan and a Neanderthal had a child, this article says. So why does the article call the parents members of “distinct hominin groups”?

“Neandertal-like traits visible in the internal structure of non-supranuchal fossae of some recent Homo sapiens: The problem of their identification in hominins and phylogenetic implications,” PLoS One, 12 March 2019. Your children might look like Neanderthals. Distinctive traits thought to represent one group over another are ambiguous: “Our study presents, for the first time, Neandertal-like traits (but not the whole set of features that justifies the autapomorphic status of the Neandertal supraniac fossa) in the internal structure of non-supranuchal fossae of some recent Homo sapiens.“