From Newsgroup: talk.origins
https://www.science.org/content/article/denisovans-towered-over-their-contemporaries-and-munched-bunch-meat
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.07.743438v1.full.pdf
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.08.07.743455v1
They got some protein profiles from some bones that they pulled from the ocean. The two individuals represented by the leg bones would have been taller than the average modern human male of that time period by 5 or 15
cm (one individual would have been around 6 inches taller than an
average modern human male). The bone make up indicates that the
Denisovans were eating mainly meat.
It is odd that we do not have very many intact bones of Denisovans. Neanderthal buried their dead, so we have been lucky enough to find
whole skeletons, but this doesn't seem to be the case for Denisovans.
Ritual cannibalism was practiced in New Guinea and that population has
the most Denisovan DNA (up to 12% in some individual genomes). My guess
is that they may have gotten the practice from the Denisovans that they
met there. This ritual process included drying the bones, crushing them
and making soup or mush out of the powder. We have examples of
cannibalism in Neanderthal, but they only broke the bones for the
marrow, so bone fragments were left in the caves to fossilize.
Ron Okimoto
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