Cave girl was half Neanderthal, half DenisovanBy Helen Briggs
BBC News
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."
Is everyone part Neanderthal?
Present-day, non-African humans have a small proportion of their DNA that comes from Neanderthals.
Some other non-African populations, depending on where they live, also have a fraction of their DNA that comes from an Asian people known as Denisovans.
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https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45271644
