The Denisovan discovery itself — the 2010 identification of an entirely new ancient human lineage from a single finger bone — was Pääbo’s laboratory’s work.

The first Neanderthal genome, published in the same year, was also his team’s achievement.

Both publications landed in the same year, from the same laboratory, using methods that Pääbo and colleagues had refined over two decades.

The specific paper describing Denny’s genome was published by Viviane Slon, a researcher in Pääbo’s laboratory, along with Fabrizio Mafessoni, Benjamin Vernot, and Pääbo himself, among others.

The identification of the 50-50 ancestry proportions, the chromosome-level analysis, the confirmation through multiple independent analytical approaches — all of this was conducted in the Leipzig laboratory that Pääbo had built into the world’s leading center for ancient hominin genomics.