There are still things that surprise me about the past of people, even though I think we know a lot about it.
We’ve learned a lot about the Neanderthals, who are our closest living cousin, over the years, which has led to some interesting discoveries.
When it comes to the Denisovans, who lived in the Lower and Middle Paleolithic, not as much is known about them.
This group of prehistoric humans was very important in the development of modern humans, and we know that even though we don’t know much about them.
It turns out that Denisovans are much more related to our ancestors than you might think.
Small pieces of bone and teeth found two years ago in Siberia’s Altai Mountains showed that the person was the only known person whose parents were from different species.
Yes, both Neanderthals and Denisovans.
The study came after a project called Finder, Fossil Fingerprinting and Identification of New Denisovan Remains from Pleistocene Asia. The goal of that project was to learn more about the long-extinct species and how they were related to Neanderthals and Homo humans.
Back in 2018, Katerina Douka, who leads the project and is a visitor at Oxford University and works at the Max Planck Institute in Jena, Germany, said, “We want to find out where they lived, when they met modern humans, and why they died out.”
The team looked at the bone pieces that were found in the Siberian cave in 2010. They noticed that most of the bones had been chewed up by hyenas and other animals, making them impossible to identify.
Current methods for identifying bone fragments take too long. Instead, Douka and Tom Higham, who is deputy director of Oxford University’s Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit and an adviser to Finder, chose Zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry, a new method that takes advantage of the fact that each major group of mammals has its own type of collagen.
One of the thousands of bones that were looked at turned out to be from a human species, but it wasn’t clear what species it was.
Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig was given a sample to look at in more detail. He found that the bone belonged to a person who was at least 13 years old when they died.
The Leipzig team looked into it more and found that exactly half of the sample had DNA from Neanderthals and the other half had DNA from Denisovans.
The re-tests proved what the team already thought: the 90,000-year-old remains were those of a hybrid daughter whose mother was a Neanderthal and her father was a Denisovan. They named the girl Denny.
Pääbo said, “If you had asked me before, I would have said we would never find this; it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
In August 2018, the team’s study was published in the journal Nature. It said, “Neanderthals and Denisovans are extinct groups of hominins that split apart more than 390,000 years ago.”
