Deep dive into the Denisovans

By now you have probably seen the new Denisovan paper in the media. John Hawks has an excellent overview, as you'd expect. The only thing I will add is to reiterate that I think population movements in near and far prehistory significantly obscure our comprehension of the patterns of past genetic variation. One reason that the Denisova hominin presents conundrums (e.g., how did Australians and Melanesians admix with a population whose only remains are found in Siberia) is that we're viewing it through the lens of the present. What other lens can we view it through? We're not time travelers. But we should be perhaps more conscious of the filter which that imposes upon our perception and model of the world. This is probably a time when it is best to have only a modest confidence in any given proposition about the prehistoric past. Also, I don't know why, but I much like this tree: