Archaeologists excavating a cave in southwestern China have unearthed fossilized remains that belonged to an enigmatic population of extinct hominins, revealing new details about their long-lost way of life.
The new haul — which includes four teeth, part of an arm bone and two skull fragments — brings the total number of known fossils from these mysterious human relatives, called the Denisovans, to more than 20. The discovery also establishes Bianfu Cave in the mountains of Yunnan province as a new and exciting locale in the study of human origins.
Alongside the seven Denisovan fossils, the researchers uncovered tools made of bone and stone, as well as fossilized pollen and animal remains. The finds paint a picture of how the Denisovans who called the cave home made a life in the region’s conifer forests 167,000 to 134,000 years ago, according to two studies published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
“We first identified some isolated teeth and then from the huge amount of animal fossils, we identified the bones — but the fragments were very hard to find at the beginning,” said Hao Li, a research professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research in Beijing and a coauthor on both papers.
“We are very lucky because this is the first site in south China to have the direct association between Denisovan fossils and rich cultural remains,” he added. “This is very rare.”
Previously, research on the Denisovans has largely had to rely on isolated discoveries with uncertain and convoluted backstories, such as a skull retrieved from a well in northeastern China and a jawbone dredged from the seafloor by a fishing boat. A team of scientists first identified Denisovans in 2010 from ancient DNA extracted from a tiny finger bone found in Denisova Cave in Siberia, which is how the group got its nickname. The breakthrough was the first time a previously unknown species of hominin had been identified solely based on DNA.
However, Neanderthals, Denisovans and our own species — Homo sapiens — are all known to have sheltered and intermingled in Denisova Cave. Teasing out concrete details about the Denisovan lifestyle from this site alone proved challenging.
That’s why Bianfu Cave, named after the bats that once lived in it, excites paleoanthropologists: It appears to have been occupied only by Denisovans for a substantial period of time. Consequently, researchers found the fossils in their original context alongside tools and other remains that allow archaeologists to date them more reliably and infer unprecedented information about the group’s habits and behavior.
Denisovan cave life
Scientists have hypothesized that Denisovans lived throughout Asia. People today in southeast Asia and Oceania carry the most Denisovan DNA, indicating that Denisovans interbred with modern humans in these areas tens of thousands of years ago. However, most Denisovan fossils have been found in North Asia.
The Bianfu Cave discovery marks only the third place that Denisovans are definitively known to have lived and shows this group occupied a diverse range of environments: Siberian mountains, the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau and the subtropical latitudes.
Researchers combed through 60,000 bone fragments excavated from the cave, identifying two dozen or so that appeared to closely resemble hominin bones and testing them to see whether the fossils contained any useful biomolecular information.
The study authors determined that no ancient DNA had been preserved in the remains. But the team recovered amino acid variants, molecules that make up proteins, that suggested three bones and two teeth were Denisovan, according to the new studies.
The research team categorized the two other teeth, which were too fragile to be sampled in the lab, as Denisovan based on their morphology and comparing them with other known teeth from the species.
“DNA is more vulnerable to degradation than proteins, and it is hard for it to be preserved in these fossils as they were more than 100,000 years old. The relatively warmer climate in Yunnan also hampered DNA preservation,” said study coauthor Qiaomei Fu, a professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Fu was also part of the team that first identified Denisovans in 2010.
The team dug three trenches at the cave site to a depth of 6.6 meters (22 feet), but only one trench yielded human fossils, in two layers of sediment that date back 167,000 to 134,000 years. Stone tools, however, showed up in 10 layers of the same trench, suggesting the site was occupied from 190,000 to 70,000 years ago.
One of the new studies focused on the marks on animal bones and stone tools unearthed in the cave. The authors found that Denisovans who lived in Bianfu fashioned tools from stone and bone and hunted large prey including water buffalo, bison-like gaur, and red and sika deer that lived in the forested environment. The cave’s inhabitants also extracted marrow from bones for sustenance, according to the study.
The stone tools the Denisovans used were not particularly sophisticated, according to Li, who described the artifacts as an “expedient technology.”
“I would not say ‘simple’ because it’s a kind of flexible adaptation,” Li said. “When they used the stone tools, they did not invest a lot of time.”
Li added that it’s most plausible that the site’s only occupants were Denisovans. The team plans to test the cave floor’s sediment for hominin DNA to confirm their hypothesis. “We can say the stone tool technology is stable with continuity, and the hunting strategy is continuous,” he said.
Mysteries remain
As well as extending the known range of the species, the new fossil finds include the first known Denisovan arm bone. The scientists can glean limited information from the bone fragment, but its radius was short, a somewhat like that of Neanderthals, according to Ryan McRae, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.
“And the insertion of the biceps muscle is oriented such that it may have been more efficient at flexing the elbow,” McRae, who wasn’t involved in the research, said.
“More interesting is the site itself,” he added. “It tells us about Denisovan occupation in one location over a sizable span of time while also filling in some geographical gaps in our understanding of Denisovans.”
Until last year, scientists knew very little about what Denisovans looked like, as most of the fossils discovered thus far had been small fragments. However, Fu and her colleagues in 2025 published research on a striking skull known as Dragon Man. The specimen had come to light in 2018 after being stashed at the bottom of a well in the city of Harbin in northeastern China for decades. The research team had extracted genetic material from Dragon Man and linked it to the Denisovans, finally giving the species a face and a proposed scientific name: Homo longi.
Much about the group remains a mystery as scientists only have a finger bone, rib fragment and the forearm bone described in the new research to study. There is still much to uncover about what the Denisovans looked like, how they lived and why they disappeared.
It’s possible Yunnan — which means “south of the clouds” — may provide some answers to these and other questions. Several Stone Age sites have been discovered in the region in recent years, yielding finds such as rarely unearthed wooden tools that date back 300,000 years.
Li said that Yunnan would have offered our archaic human relatives a hospitable climate, rich in plant and animal life. The province likely acted as a crossroads connecting north and south Asia.
“We are in the margins of Tibetan Plateau, above 2,000 meters but not too high altitude,” Li said. “This is a hot spot for biodiversity and would have provided rich resources for ancient hominins in this region.”

A researcher for one of the largest and most valuable artificial intelligence companies has publicly quit — while raising the alarm that the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Jacob Coxon, who has performed pre-training research at Anthropic and OpenAI for the last three years, posted on a wildly viral X thread that “neither company is acting responsibly.”
“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” he wrote late Tuesday, with others from the company backing his terrifying warning.
“Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote, saying his warning was “not a marketing stunt.”
“If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”
Coxon further claimed that many at OpenAI have yet to fully grasp the “civilizational stakes” involved in their work. Although he said Anthropic seems to better understand the risks involved, the company is locked in a heated race with competitors, he said.
“At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first — they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk,” he alleged.
“Accepting this race and entering the “endgame” is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack.”
“I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
Evan Hubinger, a team lead at Anthropic, seconded Coxon’s fears about the technology running amok and destroying humanity.
“Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” he wrote in response on X.
“I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
Samuel Marks, a safety expert for Anthropic, also shared Coxon’s thread while confirming that “AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction.”
“This could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are,” he stated.
He claimed that AI developers “continue despite the risk” due to “a mixture of commercial incentives and a belief that they are in a race with other, less responsible AI developers that will abuse the technology or develop it less safely.”
“I work on safety research at Anthropic because I hope my work will reduce the chance of these extinction-level bad outcomes.”
AI superintelligence is a hypothetical threshold where artificial intelligence surpasses the capabilities of even the most gifted human in every conceivable domain, which many researchers believe poses a potential existential threat to humanity.
Concerns have recently grown that AI could be on pace to escape human control after several high-profile instances of the technology going rogue.
In July, OpenAI revealed one of its models had hacked AI startup Hugging Face despite being in a “highly isolated environment.”
The revelation prompted Anthropic and Meta to acknowledge their own systems had broken free during security testing.
Coxon called the incident a “warning shot” that should prompt leading AI firms to coordinate more closely.
He closed his missive urging researchers to consider the ramifications of increasingly capable AI models, and not to accept their potentially dangerous evolution as inevitable.
“Should you put your head down because ‘it’s happening anyway’ — or take this moment to call for different conditions?” he asked.
Anthropic and OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Wednesday.

The FBI, National Security Agency and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published an alert on Tuesday that said the top Chinese AI firms have been mining cutting-edge AI from American companies, such as Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. They also used Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok to create their own.
Distillation is a common practice in the AI sector, even though it’s often prohibited by AI company terms and conditions. In recent months, American firms and officials have alleged that Chinese models were built using American models.
Since years, the U.S. accuses China of stealing American intellectual property. The report on Tuesday said that the campaign to distill alcohol was “likely” a result of Chinese government knowledge, but did not say whether Chinese intelligence had played any role.
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The China World AI Conference
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White House officials often refer to the U.S. and China as being in a race for the latest AI. On September 24, President Donald Trump will meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Both governments’ officials have been exchanging barbs over the past few weeks about whether China is stealing AI secrets.
The spokesperson of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated Wednesday that while she had not seen the report in question, China’s AI progress “is the result of its high level of scientific and technical self-reliance.”
At a Beijing regular briefing, MaoNing said: “We believe all parties must strengthen their cooperation in order to promote an open, inclusive and beneficial development of AI that is ethical, for the benefit of humanity as a whole.”
The U.S., she said, should strengthen AI cooperation with China “rather that making baseless accusations.”
Six of China’s leading AI developers were named in the report: DeepSeek (formerly Moonshot AI), Alibaba, MiniMax and StepFun. The report goes into great detail. It includes a list of specific allegations that some Chinese models have derived certain topics from American models, such as “legal specialization,” “agenttic functions,” and “coach/assistant abilities.”
The report stated that “the sheer size of these campaigns, and the sophistication of them, indicate distillation as not only a complement to the AI model development of these companies but is the core.”
Since last year at least, American companies have scattered allegations of distillation. OpenAI claimed that DeepSeek “inappropriately based” its model on ChatGPT. Google claimed in February that it had been bombarded with attempts to copy Gemini, but refused to identify a culprit.
This report includes recommendations to U.S. firms, such as improving the verification of users paying for subscriptions for American-style models. It also suggests that they compare notes about any suspicious behaviors. In certain instances, it recommended that responses to malicious queries be altered or downgraded.
Michael Kratsios (Director of White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) circulated in April a memo to federal agency heads highlighting Chinese distillation of American AI as a crucial issue. The director of the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios, circulated a memorandum to federal agency heads in April highlighting Chinese distillation of American AI systems as a critical issue.
Kratsios announced on X in July that Moonshot’s Kimi K3 was derived from Anthropic Fable, the advanced model.
Kratsios, in a letter that echoed his memo from April, wrote: “Legitimate AI Distillation, used to create smaller and more efficient models, plays an important role in this ecosystem of open innovation.” However, industrial distillation on a large scale, which is done in secret, to steal proprietary U.S. technologies and undermine American research, is not acceptable.

According to a new report, the interest of parents in their children’s education has declined in high-income nations as schools struggle with falling test scores.
Last year, over 760,000 teens in more than a dozen countries participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment. The results released on Tuesday showed that the average score in reading, math and science is at its lowest level in PISA’s history. This includes a continued drop in math and reading scores in the U.S.
China, Singapore and Taiwan scored highest on this test. Estonia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom also scored well.
Students’ surveys may provide the key to understanding why test scores have fallen so dramatically.
In comparison with 2022, nearly every country has seen a decline in the support of families for their children’s education. This is especially true for boys.
Andreas Schleicher is the director for Education and Skills at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which administers the PISA exam.
The PISA test scored 35 points more for students who reported that a member of their family asked them about what they had done in class the previous day. This is equivalent to an extra year-and-a-half’s learning. This number is adjusted for differences in socio-economic status.
Another factor is digital distraction. More than a quarter (25%) of high-income students complained that their peers were distracted by digital gadgets in the majority or all science classes. Distraction rates are lower in countries that have strict policies on the use of mobile phones at school.
Schleicher stated that there is a clear correlation between the use of digital devices by students for their leisure time and lower scores on tests. However, when tech is used to learn, results can be more nuanced.
Test scores were higher in countries where students used digital devices between two and three hours a day at school. However, scores dropped once the tech usage surpassed that level.
Asian countries dominate test scores
Asia appears to have figured out how to use technology to the benefit of students. Less than 10% of the students tested in Japan, Korea, and China mainland complained about digital distractions in classrooms. Only four provinces of China, Hong Kong, Macao and Hong Kong participated in the testing.
Asia also had the best schools in the entire world. Japan, Korea and Taiwan were among the 10 top regions for reading, math and science.
In the Chinese provinces, almost all of their children scored above or at baseline in math and reading. It was only 66% in the U.S. for math, and 74% for reading.
The dominance of China in education over the U.S. is a serious concern for experts.
Tracey Brenns, the chief of research and global strategy at the National Center for Education and the Economy (a research group on high-performing educational systems), said: “To win the technological race you will need people who are knowledgeable in science, technology and reading.”
In math, the U.S. scored the same as the average of the OECD nations that gave the test. The U.S. also ranked among the 15 best countries for reading, science and solving computational problems, a brand new category. These rankings were boosted by the declines of other countries. The reading and mathematics scores of U.S. teenagers have fallen to their lowest level since the PISA tests were first given in early 2000s.
The results should be treated with caution, according to researchers. This is because there was not a sufficient number of students and schools participating in the tests.
Less learning, more AI
In general, students with higher test scores were more likely to use artificial intelligence. The students who claimed to never have used chatbots scored higher than those who had. Nearly half of all students from developed countries say that they use AI-chatbots at least once a week to learn.
Schleicher cited China, Japan and Singapore as examples of countries who have successfully used AI in the classroom without it becoming overused. In Asia in particular, he noted, the teachers have more power to design AI systems in the classroom.
In the United States teachers are largely responsible for implementing lessons. He said that in Asia teachers play a major role.
Ink, brushes and calligraphy were used in a classroom where he saw elementary students in China practicing the art of calligraphy. Teachers scanned the students’ work using AI and analyzed how they could improve their handwriting.
Schleicher stated that “the classroom would look like it was in the 1950s if you took a picture — with students writing calligraphy using ink.” But everything was powered with AI.

Stefany Shaheen won the Democratic Primary early on Wednesday morning, in New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District. This was a highly-publicized race to fill a pivotal swing seat, which attracted a large number of Democratic candidates.
As the incumbent of her district, Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.), seeks a higher office, the Democrats will need to run a crucial midterm race in order for them to gain control of the House of Representatives.
Pappas has been representing the district in Washington since 2019. Last year, he announced his bid to run for U.S. Senate. He was running to replace the older Shaheen.
The Republicans hope to capture the district, for the first in 12 years, while they try to maintain their razor thin House majority.
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Shaheen narrowly beat Maura Sullivan a Marine Veteran and Obama era Official in a crowded race. According to unofficial results, Carleigh Beriont finished third. She is a progressive and union organizer.
Christian Urrutia is an Army National Guard Officer and attorney in international law. Urrutia is another progressive candidate who ended his campaign this weekend, and gave Shaheen a last-minute endorsement.
Shaheen was endorsed in the final days before the primary election by Carol Shea Porter, a long-time Democratic Rep. who succeeded Pappas. Shea Porter was a Portsmouth City Council member, former Chair of the Police Commission and co-founder of a chronic-care management company.
In recent weeks the primary fight became more bitter. Shaheen’s ad accused Sullivan of having been funded by AIPAC and corporate lobbyists. Sullivan’s ad called Shaheen a ‘fancy lastname, and accused her of being entitled to the support of New Hampshire voters.
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The daughter of Sen. Shaheen who retired in March announced by her.
She said, “I am so proud of Stefany for answering the call and serving the district where she was raised and born. Stefany has worked in the Portsmouth City Council, and she is a strong advocate for clean and affordable water and health care.”
She’s working to win voters’ approval in her right, and on her merits – and I could not be more proud to support her campaign.
When it came to family, the younger Shaheen was careful to tread carefully. She broke from her mother when she learned of her senator’s agreement to end government shutdown last year. The family name did help her gain support and increase fundraising.
Shaheen’s congressional campaign emphasized such priorities as Medicare for all, tax incentives for first-time homeowners, and overhauling Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
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Sullivan, on her part, positioned herself as a veteran with experience. She highlighted on her website her service as a Marine, her time as an Assistant Secretary at Veterans Affairs in 2014 under the Obama Administration, and her experience as a health technology executive in the private sector.
I joined the Obama Administration. In a video campaign, Sullivan stated that he was “proud to have worked on national security issues and healthcare reforms to assist other military families.”
Sullivan’s platform calls for cracking down what she called price gouging. It also includes bolstering VA, fighting Trump’s tariffs, and increasing federal investment in housing.
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Shaheen now faces off against Republican Anthony DiLorenzo in the general elections.
DiLorenzo, an auto executive endorsed by Donald Trump, beat steel executive Hollie noveletsky who showed her Trump support as she failed to win the GOP nomination for a second time.