Buried No More: Giants, Ghosts, and Our Forgotten Relatives

Harini Bhat (0:00)

This is Rewind.

Did you know giants may have been real and that they walked among us? Or that a race of tiny hominids was burying its dead long before we did? And here's the wild thing. We learned all this from just a few fragments of bone. I'm Dr. Harini Bhat, and this is Hidden History, a Rewind Original powered by PAVE Studios. On this show, we're exploring some of the most mysterious events from history that have yet to be fully explained and examining all the different theories from science to the supernatural, and everything in between. From vanished civilizations and doomsday prophecies to paranormal experiences and unexplained phenomena, I'm looking at it all and I want you to join me. Before we begin, I'd love it if you could rate, review and follow Hidden History. Your support allows our community to grow and for other people to discover the show. We're also on YouTube with full video that brings each episode to life. Just search at Hidden History Pod and subscribe. Today's episode is a little different. I'm going way back in time. And instead of one mystery, I've got two and they're both connected by the same hidden history. The fact that the human family tree is a lot more crowded than anyone told you in school.

Okay, before we get to the brand new discovery, I need you to understand just how weird the Denisovan story is. Because this is the only human relative we've ever discovered backwards.

Normally you find a skull, you look at it and you name it. With the Denisovans, we had their entire genome before we had a single face.

In 2008, Russian archaeologists digging in a cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, found the tip of a pinky finger. That's it. A fragment of one bone from a young girl who died tens of thousands of years ago.

Now, the cave was cold and cold is great for preserving DNA. So a team in Germany sequenced it, fully expecting to find a Neanderthal. In case you're not familiar, the Neanderthals are modern humans' closest extinct relatives. A stocky, heavy-browed human species with brains as big as ours, who lived across Europe and Western Asia until roughly 40,000 years ago. The average Neanderthal man stood about 5'5 and weighed around 143 pounds. We found thousands of them. So a Neanderthal turning up in a Siberian cave would have been a perfectly ordinary result.

That's not what they found, though. The DNA wasn't Neanderthal. It wasn't the modern human Homo sapiens either. No, in 2010, they announced that this finger belonged to a previously unknown branch of humanity, a sister group to the Neanderthals that had split off from them hundreds of thousands of years earlier.

They named them after the K, the Denisovans. And thanks to that DNA, we learned incredible things about them, all from the tip of a pinky.

We knew they'd enter bread with our ancestors because their DNA is still inside living people today.

If you have roots in Papua New Guinea, Melanesia or Aboriginal Australia, somewhere around 4-6% of your genome is Denisovan. And here's something cool. The gene that lets Tibetans thrive at 15,000 feet without getting altitude sickness, that came from Denisovans. Oh, and in 2018, in that same Siberian cave, they found a bone from a teenage girl whose mom was a Neanderthal, and whose dad was a Denisovan.

They nicknamed her Denny. So these groups weren't just neighbors, they were literally family. And for almost a decade, that was the whole story. A genome, a finger, some teeth. Compared to the Neanderthals, where we have thousands of fossils, whole skeletons, even burials, the Denisovans were basically a ghost. We knew they'd haunted Asia for hundreds of thousands of years. We just couldn't see them. And then the ghosts start showing up in strange places.

In 2019, a jawbone that a monk had found in a cave on the Tibetan Plateau back in 1980 was identified as Denisovan.

Not through DNA this time, which was too degraded, but through proteins preserved in the tooth enamel. And that cave keeps giving. In 2024, a team sorted through more than 2,500 bone fragments from the cave floor. They picked out a Denisovan rib and dated it somewhere between 48,000 and 32,000 years ago. One of the youngest Denisovan fossils ever found. Scattered around it were the butchered bones of blue sheep, wild yak, woolly rhino, marmots and birds. These were people living and eating well in one of the harshest places on the planet and doing it for more than 100,000 years.

Then came the big discovery, a nearly complete skull. The backstory in this one is straight out of a movie. In 1933, a Chinese laborer was building a bridge over the Tsunghua River in Harbin in Northeastern China. The region was under Japanese occupation. While he worked, he pulled a massive skull out of the riverbank. He realized it was important, and instead of handing it over to the occupiers, he wrapped it up and hid it at the bottom of an abandoned well. He kept that secret for the rest of his life. And it wasn't until 2018, right before he died, that he told his grandson where it was. The family dug it up and donated it to a university. In 2021, scientists described it and gave it a new species name, homo longi or dragon man after the Black Dragon River. But a lot of people looked at that skull and thought, hold on a second, big brow ridges, huge molars, a brain as big as ours, this looks like what we'd expect a Denisovan to look like. So in 2025, a team extracted proteins from the bone, and for good measure, scraped the fossilized plaque off its one remaining tooth, and pulled mitochondrial DNA out of that. Both said the same thing. Dragon man was a Denisovan. After 15 years, the ghost had a face.