The Ancient Girl Whose DNA Revealed Her Parents Were Two Different Human Species
It was one bone fragment among many in a cave that had accumulated such fragments for hundreds of thousands of years.
The ZooMS analysis flagged it as hominin and put it on the list for DNA extraction.
The DNA extraction worked — a result that, given the age of the specimen and the general challenges of ancient DNA work, was not guaranteed.
The sequencing worked.
The bioinformatic analysis worked.
And the result — the astonishing, improbable result — revealed what no one had expected to find in any ancient specimen: a first-generation hybrid, born to parents from two different ancient human species.
The fragment is now preserved at the Max Planck Institute’s repository for ancient samples, catalogued as Denisova 11.
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