NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The gene variant that enabled Tibetans to adapt to living at such high altitudes appears to have come from Denisovans, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and BGI-Shenzen reported today in Nature.
This finding indicates that as modern humans moved into new regions, they mixed with other hominins already there, such as the now-extinct Denisovans, and picked up variants allowing them to adapt to these new locales.