In anthropology, bones don’t always tell the whole story. Ancient remains can be so rare that an entire species of hominids can be compressed into one single fragment of bone. Thousands of generations, millions of individuals, epic untold stories — and our only insight is a stray tooth, or a few curving shards of skull.

That leaves us without a true view of who these people were, even when it comes to our most recent ancestors, like the Neanderthals or the Denisovans. But a new study usin