Tam Pa Ling Cave

Why in news?

• Recently, a team of researchers have been excavating at Tam Pà Ling caves for many years and found more and more evidence of Homo sapiens of earlier times.

Major findings:

• It revealed that humans were present in the vicinity of Tam Pà Ling Cave for roughly 56,000 years.
• It also confirmed that, far from reflecting a rapid dump of sediments, the site contains sediments that accumulated steadily over some 86,000 years.
• The age of the lowest fossil, a fragment of a leg bone found seven metres deep, suggests modern humans arrived in this region between 86,000 and 68,000 years ago.
• Even researchers found a toothsome 150,000 years old belonging to a Denisovan.

Who are Denisovans?

• They are extinct human relatives otherwise known only from remains found in Siberia and Tibet.
• They lived lakhs of years ago, coexisting with Neanderthals in some regions and interbreeding with early modern humans in some cases.
• They were first identified as a separate species in 2010, following the discovery of a fragment of a finger bone and two teeth, dating back to about 40,000 years ago, in the Denisovan Cave in Siberia.

PRACTICE QUESTION

The word ‘Denisovan’ is sometimes mentioned in media in reference to:

(a) Fossils of a kind of dinosaurs

(b) An early human species

(c) A cave system found in North-East India.

(d) A geological period in the history of Indian subcontinent

Answer