Ancient Girl's Parents Were Two Different Human Species

[skyblue1]

When the results first popped up, paleogeneticist Viviane Slon didn't believe it. “What went wrong?” she recalls asking herself at the time. Her mind immediately turned to the analysis. Did she make a mistake? Could the sample be contaminated?

The data was telling her that the roughly 90,000-year-old flake of bone she had tested was from a teenager that had a Neanderthal mom and Denisovan dad. Researchers had long suspected that these two groups of ancient human relatives interbred, finding whiffs of both their genes in ancient and modern human genomes. But no one had ever found the direct offspring from such a pairing.

Slon, a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, sampled the bone from another spot; she got the same result. So she did it again. After running tests on six samples in all, the results always came out the same: The bone had nearly equal amounts of DNA from a Neanderthal and a Denisovan.

The landmark find, published this week in Nature, marks the first definitive evidence for offspring that came directly from interbreeding of these ancient species and is helping shape our understanding of hominin interactions.

“It's amazing to be able to find something like this,” says David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard who was not part of the work. “It seemed unlikely that we would be able to catch it happening in the act—an individual that's really the product of a first-generation hybrid.”

more:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/scien...ent-human/

[142857]

I saw this in the news, it is really really cool. A smoking gun of sorts that should settle a few debates.

I would love to have had the opportunity to meet some of these people.

[Genesis]

Whoa o.O

A crossbreed? Interesting....

[d_olson27]

I thought it was already known that Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans interbred. Maybe it wasn't known that Denisovans could interbreed with either.

[142857]

I think it was known, or at least very strongly suspected. But this is the smoking gun.