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

The remarkable thing about her is only knowable through the lens of a science that did not exist until long after her death.

And part of the appeal is the story she tells about what it means to be human.

The discovery of Denny, combined with the broader body of ancient DNA evidence for interbreeding between modern humans and archaic groups, suggests that the boundary between “us” and “them” in the ancient human world was never as clear as the categorical language of species implies.

The people we call Neanderthals, the people we call Denisovans, the people we call modern humans — they lived in a world of contact and encounter, of migration and meeting, of biological exchange that left traces in our genomes that persist to this day.