LONDON, May 1 (Xinhua) -- A 160,000-year-old mandible fossil may indicate that Denisovans, an ancient hominin group, adapted to living on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau long before modern humans even arrived in the region, according to a study published online on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

"The mandible is by far the earliest known hominin fossil on the plateau," one of the authors of the study, Zhang Dongju, told Xinhua. He is an associate professor at Lanzhou University, China.

Denisovans are an extinct sister group to Neanderthals, known only from fossil fragments previously found at Denisova cave in Russia. Enditem