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

Just this genome.

In that genome, the researchers who analyzed it found the chromosome-level evidence of her parentage — Neanderthal variants on one copy of each chromosome, Denisovan variants on the other — and understood what it meant.

They found that her Neanderthal mother had come from a western population, not from the local Altai Neanderthals.

They found that her father was a local Denisovan, belonging to the population that had long occupied the Altai region.

They found that she was real, that her existence was certain, and that everything she represented — about ancient human interactions, about the permeability of the boundaries between ancient human groups, about the nature of what we call species in the context of ancient human evolution — was true.