We know this happened.

We do not know the specific words, the specific moment, the specific expression on a researcher’s face when the verification was complete enough to believe.

Science is conducted by human beings with inner lives, and the inner life of the moment when Denny’s parentage was confirmed is not part of the scientific record.

What is part of the record is the paper itself — careful, precise, methodical, restrained in its claims in the way that good science is restrained.

And then the brief but unmistakable hint of what it felt like, in the closing paragraph of the 2018 Nature paper, when the authors wrote that the finding was “direct evidence for mixture between Neanderthals and Denisovans” and noted its implications for understanding the contact between the two groups.