Short answers, pulled from the story.
Denisova Cave is located in the Bashelaksky Range of the Altai Mountains in Siberia, Russia, near the village of Chorny Anui and approximately 150 km south of Barnaul. The cave sits about 28 meters above the right bank of the Anuy River and has a floor area of about 270 square meters.
The Denisova hominin is an archaic human population identified from bone fragments found in Denisova Cave, confirmed as a distinct group in 2010 after mitochondrial DNA analysis by Svante Pääbo's team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Denisovans interbred with the ancestors of modern Melanesians, and in June 2025 researchers confirmed they belong to the species Homo longi.
Archaeological artifacts at Denisova Cave span back to approximately 125,000-180,000 years ago across 22 identified sediment layers. Among the notable finds is a 7 cm sewing needle made from bird bone, estimated to be around 50,000 years old, which was described as the most ancient needle known at the time of its 2016 discovery.
Denisova 11 was a female who was at least thirteen years old at death, identified from a bone fragment weighing 1.68 g found in layer 12 of the East Gallery. Whole genome sequencing showed she was the direct first-generation offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father, the first known hybrid between these two archaic human groups.
The Altai Neanderthal is a Neanderthal woman whose toe bone was discovered in layer 11.4 of the East Gallery in 2010. Molecular clock analysis of the bone's mitochondrial DNA suggested an age of approximately 120,000 years, and it yielded the first high-coverage Neanderthal genome ever sequenced.
In 2019, archaeologists found a 42 mm long figurine of a cave lion carved from woolly mammoth tusk in the eleventh layer of the South Gallery. The piece is 8 mm thick and 11 mm high, decorated with eighteen rows of notch ornaments, and Siberian archaeologists proposed it may be the oldest animal figurine in the world.