Scientists Uncovered A 90,000-Year-Old Hybrid Of Two Extinct Human Species
T. Higham, University of OxfordThis bone fragment was found in 2012 at Denisova Cave in Russia by Russian archaeologists and represents the daughter of a Neandertal mother and a Denisovan father.
A study published in Nature on Aug. 22 which analyzed a piece of bone no larger than a quarter, discovered that the ancient girl to whom the fragment belonged was a never-before-discovered hybrid of two ancient human relatives: a Neanderthal and a Denisovan.
A group of Russian archaeologists originally came across the groundbreaking bone fragment in 2012 inside of the Denisova Cave in Siberia, according to a report released by the study’s authors. In their analysis, the researchers discovered that the bone belonged to a girl who died around 13-years-old nearly 90,000 years ago.
The bone was transferred to a group of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. They sequenced the genome from the fragment and shockingly discovered that the girl’s mother was a Neanderthal and her father was a Denisovan.
B. Viola, MPI f. Evolutionary AnthropologyView of the valley from above the Denisova Cave archaeological site, Russia.
Denisovans are a relatively new discovery as well made in 2010 when a team of researchers found unusual hominin DNA from bone found in the Denisova cave in Siberia, according to National Geographic. They named the newly-discovered hominins Denisovan after the cave.
Neanderthals and Denisovans are the closest examples of extinct relatives of modern humans and were separated from each other more than 390,000 years ago.
“We knew from previous studies that Neanderthals and Denisovans must have occasionally had children together,” Viviane Slon, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute, said in a statement. “But I never thought we would be so lucky as to find an actual offspring of the two groups.”
In addition to this startling archaeology news, they found that the ancient 13-year-old’s Denisovan father also had at least one Neanderthal ancestor in his family tree, further confirming their previous theory that Neanderthals and Denisovans interacted quite frequently.
This teenager’s 90,000-year-old bone is not just teaching us about the mating of our human ancestors – this fragment is helping mold our understanding of hominin interactions overall.
