Denny’s father was a Denisovan.

This was Denny.

How Scientists Knew For Certain

The finding was extraordinary enough that the researchers who made it were rigorous in their verification before they published.

The 2018 paper, published in Nature under the title “The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father,” was the product of years of analysis after the initial identification.

The key evidence came from multiple independent lines of analysis, all pointing to the same conclusion.