GENETICS

A Girl of Two Peoples

between ~140,000 and ~80,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Middle Stone Age · Last glacial

From a bone fragment barely larger than a coin, found in Denisova Cave in Siberia, ancient DNA revealed a teenage girl, the first-generation child of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. Her father's own line carried traces of earlier Neanderthal ancestry, and her mother was closer to Neanderthals who later lived in far-off Europe than to an earlier Neanderthal from the same cave: people moved, met and mixed across Eurasia.

Why it matters

Finding a first-generation child among the handful of archaic humans whose genomes have been sequenced suggests that such unions can hardly have been rare. The old picture of separate human species passing without touching has collapsed; where groups met, they mingled. Our own genomes carry the same lesson, and Denny is its most direct witness: one girl, two humanities.

Dating & uncertainty

Direct radiocarbon dating says only that the bone is older than 50,000 years. Bayesian modelling combining radiocarbon, uranium-series, optical ages, stratigraphy and genetics places Denisova 11 between about 140,000 and 80,000 years ago.

Sources

1. Slon et al. (2018), Nature · The genome of the offspring of a Neandertal mother and a Denisovan fatherdoi:10.1038/s41586-018-0455-x
2. Douka et al. (2019), Nature · Age estimates for hominin fossils and the onset of the Upper Palaeolithic at Denisova Cavedoi:10.1038/s41586-018-0870-z
3. Jacobs et al. (2019), Nature · Timing of archaic hominin occupation of Denisova Cave in southern Siberiadoi:10.1038/s41586-018-0843-2

Our species’ history as one day

15:37:088 h 23 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day