You might think that classifying the remains of ancient human ancestors should be easy. When someone finds a skull or other bone, the scientists can analyze it and determine whether it is a modern human, a home erectus, or any of a number of other options.

The fact is, however, that it is not always easy, especially with certain humanoid ancestors like the Denisovans. Fortunately, according to a study that was published int eh Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, details are becoming clearer, which is helping in this area.

One example of this is the skull of a prehistoric man that was found in the 1970s in China. This skull was known as Dali Man and had long been the subject of a debate as to whether it was a Home Erectus or an archaic Homo sapiens. Thanks to the new study, it has now been identified as a Denisovan.

Denisovans were first identified in 2010 thanks to the DNA that was gathered from a finger bone found in Siberia’s Denisova Cave. Since then, it has been difficult to identify other examples of Denisovans because there weren’t many confirmed fossil remains on record.

As fossils go through proper classification, however, this is changing and several examples have been found across Asia, which shows that this ancestor likely spread out over a large area in the region during the Middle Pleistocene era.

The authors of the study analyzed patterns of gene regulation from the known Denisovan genome. This helped them to identify 32 physical traits that members would likely have. All of them are related to various aspect of skull morphology.

The same technique was used to reconstruct Neanderthal and chimpanzee morphological profiles as a way to test the effectiveness of the method. They found that the method was able to correctly classify them over 85% of the time, which is quite good.

From there, they scanned various Middle Pleistocene fossil records and specimens, including the Dali Man. It had 15 of the 18 traits associated with Denisovans, making it highly likely that this is what he was.

The method used in the study will likely be used to analyze many other fossils that have been found, and those that are found in the future, with the goal of more precisely categorizing them. This will likely result in the correcting of many other fossils that were mistakenly listed as Homo erectus or others.

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