The Ancient Girl Whose DNA Revealed Her Parents Were Two Different Human Species
If Denny herself had children, what happened to them?
Did they reproduce successfully, and did their mixed ancestry persist into later populations?
The small but detectable signals of Neanderthal ancestry in Denisovan genomes, and of Denisovan ancestry in Neanderthal genomes, suggest that gene flow did persist — but the specific histories of these hybrid lineages are uncharacterized.
And what does Denny’s existence imply about the population of the Altai region at the time?
Were there many such encounters in this specific region, making it a kind of genetic mixing zone for multiple ancient human groups?