What Denny’s Life Might Have Been

Science cannot reconstruct the lived experience of a girl who died 90,000 years ago.

The evidence is a fragment of bone, a sequence of DNA, and the general knowledge of the world in which she lived.

Anything beyond those facts is speculation, and responsible science distinguishes between evidence and inference.

But what the evidence does allow is a general understanding of the world Denny inhabited — the environmental context, the social structures likely shared by Neanderthals and Denisovans, the material challenges of life in the Altai Mountains during the Pleistocene.

Denny was a child — probably a young teenager or perhaps younger, based on the state of bone development in the fragment that was analyzed.