The Denisovan discovery followed immediately, from the same laboratory using the same methods.

By 2018, when the Denisova 11 genome was published, the technology had advanced further still.

The coverage achievable for ancient genomes — the number of times each position in the genome is read, which determines the confidence of the sequence — had increased dramatically.

The analytical methods for detecting and quantifying ancestry proportions had been refined through years of application to dozens of ancient genomes.

The computational tools for identifying specific chromosomal regions and determining their parental origin had been developed specifically for the kinds of ancestry analysis that Denny’s genome required.