ABOVE: The East Chamber of Denisova Cave, Russia
IAET SB RAS, SERGEI ZELENSKY
A13-year-old girl, called Denisova 11, who died approximately 90,000 years ago had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father, according to a study published today (August 22) in Nature. Neanderthals and Denisovans are closely related, but distinct groups of ancient humans.
“We knew from previous studies that Neanderthals and Denisovans must have occasionally had children together,” coauthor Viviane Slon, a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, tells the BBC. “But I never thought we would be so lucky as to find an actual offspring of the two groups.”
While Neanderthals lived in the western part of Eurasia and Denisovans in the eastern region, the two were known to have mingled—but there was no first-generation sample found yet.
The researchers sequenced the girl’s genome from a 2.5-cm-wide bone fragment originally found in 2012 ...
