A paper by Curnoe, Liu, Bao, Tacon and Ren published on Dec. 17, 2015, describes the unusal morphology of the remains found in Maludong (Yunnan), Southwest China.
They analyzed a femur found among other hominin remains and found that "...the Maludong femur has affinities to archaic hominins, especially Lower Pleistocene femora" but, this person lived only 14,000 years ago, so they were contemporaneous with modern Homo sapiens in that part of Asia. Something akin to the Flores hominin.
Are they Denisovan remains?
This is the best part (bold highlight is mine):
"It is intriguing that such a plesiomorphic hominin could have survived at Maludong until near the end of the Pleistocene. Yet, this finding applies also to H. floresiensis, with its apparent minimum geological age only slightly older than MLDG 1678. Homo floresiensis has only been found on the island of Flores in eastern Indonesia though, and its occurrence has been explained by island biogeography. Moreover, the Maludong femur is distinct from the highly unusual femora of this species, with its unique mosaic of traits including resemblances to Australopithecus taxa. One possible explanation is that the Maludong femur samples the population presently known only from Denisova Cave in the Altai region and dubbed the “Denisovans”. Another candidate is the presently unnamed taxon represented by the Xujiayao fossils. However, the absence of femora from both of these groups makes these scenarios impossible to test at present...
...the Maludong femur might represent a relic, tropically adapted, archaic population that survived relatively late in the biogeographically complex region of Southwest China. " [1]
Sources
[1] Curnoe D, Ji X, Liu W, Bao Z, Taçon PSC, Ren L (2015) A Hominin Femur with Archaic Affinities from the Late Pleistocene of Southwest China. PLoS ONE 10(12): e0143332. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0143332
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