The Ancient Girl Whose DNA Revealed Her Parents Were Two Different Human Species

We are, in a very real sense, the descendants of Denny and children like her.

Not directly — the generational distance is too great, and the dilution of ancient ancestry through the modern gene pool is extensive.

But in the sense that the ancient human world that produced Denny was the same world that produced us — the encounters, the migrations, the meetings of different ancient human groups across the landscape of Pleistocene Eurasia and Asia — we are connected to her story in a way that is more than historical.

The diversity of modern humanity reflects, in part, the diversity of the ancient human world that Denny inhabited.