GENETICS

A Girl with Two Peoples

between ~140,000 and ~80,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Last glacial

From a bone fragment barely larger than a coin, found in Denisova Cave in Siberia, ancient DNA revealed a teenage girl whose mother was a Neanderthal and whose father a Denisovan, first generation. Her father's line itself carried older Neanderthal ancestry, and her mother was closer to Neanderthals of distant Europe than to the one who had lived in the same cave long before: people moved, met and mixed across Eurasia.

Why it matters

Finding a first-generation child among the handful of ancient genomes ever sequenced means such unions can hardly have been rare. The old picture of separate human species passing without touching has collapsed; where groups met, they mingled. Our own genomes carry the same lesson, and Denny is its most direct witness: one girl, two humanities.

Dating & uncertainty

Direct radiocarbon only says the bone is older than 50,000 years. Bayesian modelling combining radiocarbon, uranium-series, optical ages, stratigraphy and genetics places Denisova 11 between about 140,000 and 80,000 years ago.

Sources

1. Slon et al. (2018), Nature · The genome of the offspring of a Neandertal mother and a Denisovan fatherdoi:10.1038/s41586-018-0455-x
2. Douka et al. (2019), Nature · Age estimates for hominin fossils and the onset of the Upper Palaeolithic at Denisova Cavedoi:10.1038/s41586-018-0870-z
3. Jacobs et al. (2019), Nature · Timing of archaic hominin occupation of Denisova Cave in southern Siberiadoi:10.1038/s41586-018-0843-2

Our species’ history as one day

15:37:088 h 23 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day