And the bone that contains her story is still there, in a laboratory drawer, smaller than anything you might expect to hold such a revelation.

Small enough to hold in the palm of your hand.

Big enough to change history.

The Ancient DNA Revolution And How It Changed Everything

To fully appreciate what finding Denny meant, it helps to understand how the field of ancient DNA arrived at a point where such a discovery was even possible.

The arc from the first tentative attempts to extract ancient genetic material to the high-coverage genome sequencing of Denisova 11 spans barely four decades — but those four decades represent one of the most dramatic methodological advances in the history of biology.

The concept of extracting and reading ancient DNA was first proposed in the early 1980s, when the field of molecular biology had advanced enough that researchers could imagine the possibility.