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Bone remains found in a Tibetan cave 3,280 m above sea level indicate an ancient group of humans survived here for many millennia, according to a new study published in Nature.

The Denisovans are an extinct species of ancient human that lived at the same time and in the same places as Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Only a handful of Denisovan remains have ever been discovered by archaeologists. Little is known about the group, including when they became extinct, but evidence exists to suggest they interbred with both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens.

A research team led by Lanzhou University, China, the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, CAS, China, and involving the University of Reading studied more than 2,500 bones from the Baishiya Karst Cave on the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau, one of the only two places where Denisovans are known to have lived.

In pausing to think before making an important decision, we may imagine the potential outcomes of different choices we could make. While this “mental simulation” is central to how we plan and make decisions in everyday life, how the brain works to accomplish this is not well understood.

An international team of scientists has now uncovered neural mechanisms used in planning. Its results, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, suggest that an interplay between the brain’s prefrontal cortex and hippocampus allows us to imagine future outcomes in order to guide our decisions.

“The prefrontal cortex acts as a ‘simulator,’ mentally testing out possible actions using a cognitive map stored in the hippocampus,” explains Marcelo Mattar, an assistant professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology and one of the paper’s authors.