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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Cave girl was half Neanderthal, half Denisovan [bbc.com]

Once upon a time, two early humans of different ancestry met at a cave in Russia. Some 50,000 years later, scientists have confirmed that they had a daughter together. DNA extracted from bone fragments found in the cave show the girl was the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.

The discovery, reported in Nature, gives a rare insight into the lives of our closest ancient human relatives. Neanderthals and Denisovans were humans like us, but belonged to different species.

"We knew from previous studies that Neanderthals and Denisovans must have occasionally had children together," says Viviane Slon, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany. "But I never thought we would be so lucky as to find an actual offspring of the two groups."

Denisovan [wikipedia.org].

Also at Inverse [inverse.com], NYT [nytimes.com], and The Atlantic [theatlantic.com].

The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father [nature.com] (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0455-x) (DX [doi.org])

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