Weird4 min(s) read
Published 14:22 13 Aug 2026 GMT
Leg bones belonging to an extinct human species have been pulled from the sea floor off Taiwan and they belonged to individuals who stood up to 6ft 3in tall and weighed over 200 pounds.
The bones are Denisovan, a species of archaic human that lived across a vast stretch of Asia and interbred with Homo sapiens thousands of years ago.
Until now, almost everything known about them came from teeth, a few jaw fragments, and a single finger bone.
These are the first leg bones ever identified.
They change what scientists know about how big Denisovans actually were.
They are also, predictably, being used online as proof that the biblical Nephilim were real - this is the internet, after all.
A femur and a tibia, both recovered from sediment in the Penghu Channel off the coast of Taiwan.
Protein analysis published in the journal Science confirmed the bones belonged to the Denisovan lineage.
Two individuals are represented.
One stood roughly 5ft 11in and weighed about 183 pounds.
The other was approximately 6ft 3in and 200 pounds.
Both were larger than earlier Homo erectus and Late Pleistocene Homo sapiens found in eastern Asia, according to researchers cited by the European Research Council.
The study also suggests the Denisovan lineage more broadly had robust bodies and large brains.
Whether these two individuals were representative of the species as a whole, or whether they happened to be unusually large, is not yet known. More fossils are needed.
The research has not yet been peer-reviewed.
The biological sex of both individuals was inferred rather than directly confirmed.
This is the part that sounds dramatic in a headline but has a perfectly ordinary explanation.
During glacial periods, sea levels were significantly lower than they are today.
Land that is now underwater was once exposed.
The bones ended up on what is now the sea floor because the ground they were originally deposited on is now beneath the Penghu Channel.
It is climate history and geology. It is not evidence of a biblical flood.
Althought that is definitely something that has been argued.
Jimmy Corsetti, the YouTuber behind the Bright Insight channel, posted his interpretation of the discovery and connected the bones to the Nephilim, the giant figures described in the Hebrew Bible.
The Nephilim appear in Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33. They are described as the offspring of divine beings and human women, sometimes translated as 'giants' or 'fallen ones'.
The first Book of Enoch expands on the story further. Mainstream biblical scholarship treats them as mythological.
Corsetti's argument is that the size of the Denisovan bones, combined with the fact that they were found on a sea floor, lines up with ancient accounts of giant beings who lived before a great flood.
The study's authors made no such connection.
The bones are large for an ancient human but not supernaturally so.
A 6ft 3in individual is tall, not a giant. There are people that height in every gym in America right now.
That said, there is something genuinely interesting buried in the speculation.
Ancient communities that encountered unusually large bones, whether Denisovan or otherwise, may well have built stories around them.
It is not difficult to imagine someone in the ancient world digging up a femur significantly larger than anything they had seen before and deciding it belonged to something more than human.
It could be the prehistoric equivalent of a Reddit thread spiraling into mythology.
But 'may have inspired myths' is not the same thing as 'proves myths were true'.
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Denisovans are one of the most important pieces of the human story and until this week they were known from almost nothing.
A finger bone found in a Siberian cave in 2008. A jawbone from a cave on the Tibetan Plateau.
Teeth and fragments, but enough to know they existed and that they interbred with Homo sapiens, but not enough to know what they looked like below the neck.
These leg bones change that.
For the first time, scientists can estimate how tall Denisovans were, how heavy, how their bodies were built.
The genetic traces they left behind are still detectable in modern populations across Asia and the Pacific.
Parts of the Denisovan genome live on in people walking around today.
That is a story about real ancient humans whose DNA is still inside living people. It does not need the Nephilim to make it remarkable.
