The specific questions that Denny opened — about the frequency of ancient interbreeding, about the geographic patterns of contact between different ancient human groups, about the fate of hybrid lineages — will have at least partial answers.

And Denny will still be there, in her storage facility in Leipzig, as the first and still most vivid proof that the ancient human world was connected in ways that we are only beginning to understand.

The bone that started everything.

Still waiting.

Still speaking.

To anyone with the science to listen.

She was real.

She was here.

And now, at last, we know.

The field will keep asking.

The bones will keep answering.

And the story of Denny — the girl whose parents were two different human species, preserved in a fragment of ancient bone for 90,000 years — will remain the most astonishing single data point in the history of what we know about where we came from.