This 90,000-year-old young girl lived in the Altai Mountains on the southern edge of Siberia and, while she didn’t live long, she was rather remarkable, to say the least, being the only known hybrid between Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Her body was located in a nearby cave, and scientists have been studying it continuously since it was discovered.
In case you didn’t already know, Homo Sapiens were not the only humans on this planet as far as we know, as they were joined by Neanderthals and Denisovans thousands of years ago.
While we know a lot about Neanderthals from many sources, we only discovered the Denisovans in 2010.
They apparently died extinct around 40,000 years ago, around the same time as the Neanderthals, and this specimen demonstrates that they co-existed with the Neanderthals nearly 90,000 years ago.
Denisova 11 was her moniker, and despite her name, she is not the 11th discovered Denisovan, but rather the fifth.
Half of her chromosomes belonged to Denisovans, while the other half belonged to Neanderthals, making it quite simple to determine her ancestry.
Viviane Slon researched her and concluded that she was fathered by a Denisovan and mothered by a Neanderthal based on her mitochondrial DNA.
Since then, more and more hybrids have been discovered, indicating that most of history is not as it appears, as interbreeding was clearly a significant part of it as far as we can tell.
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