He passed the bone to Jigme Tenpe Wangchug [zh], the sixth Gungthang [de] tulku, who recognized it as an important hominin fossil and gave it to geologist Dong Guangrong of Lanzhou University in the 1980s.

[1][3] In 2010, Chen and his Ph.D. student Zhang Dongju began to study the bone together with Dong and surveyed a number of caves in the Xiahe area.

In 2018, Zhang and her colleagues finally conducted a systematic excavation of the cave and discovered numerous Palaeolithic tools and animal bones bearing cut marks.

Hublin and his Ph.D. student Frido Welker joined the research and helped identify the mandible as Denisovan using protein analysis.

[10] This fossil discovery adds supporting evidence for the notion that archaic hominins were successful in adapting to a high-altitude, low-oxygen environment.

The Xiahe mandible shares one obvious trait, large teeth, that is similar to the Denisovan fossils on record from Denisova Cave.