Interesting.
Ancient child thought to be only known individual whose parents were two different speciesAn ancient child from Siberia is believed to be the only know individual whose parents were from two different species.
The deduction was made possible by the 2010 unearthing of tiny fragments of bone and teeth fragment remains of a Denisovan, who lived in Lower and Middle Palaeolithic ages.
While we know much about Neanderthals, not much information is available to the public about Denisovans.
The remains were unearthed from the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia more than a decade ago. But it was only recently that scientists were able to use the fossil pieces to arrive at some answers.
For more than ten years, little research was done on the remains due to technological limitations. But that changed with the commencement of a new project called 'Finder', which aimed to shed light on the relationship between Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, and the Denisovans.
The Denisovans or Denisova hominins are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans that ranged across Asia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic. They are only known from a few physical remains and DNA evidence.
Fossil Fingerprinting and Identification of New Denisovan Remains from Pleistocene Asia is what Finder stands for.
The team began studying the fragments discovered in 2010 and were soon able to conclude that nearly all the bones had been chewed by animals, rendering them unidentifiable.
Project leader Katerina Douka, of the Max Planck Institute in Jena, along with Tom Higham, deputy director of Oxford University’s Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit and an adviser to Finder, worked with a new tech called Zooarchaeology by mass spectrometry, which helped them arrive at the fact that every mammal group has or have had a distinct form of collagen.
When the research proceeded further, the scientists came to know that one of the thousands of bones studied was from a human species.
Further analysis at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig revealed the bone belonged to a person aged 13 or older at the time of death.
The team from Max Planck Institute eventually found that half of the sample contained Neanderthal DNA, and the other half Denisovan DNA, making the individual the only known being whose parents were from two different species.
After authentication of their groundbreaking find, the scientists came to know that the remains from Siberia were of a hybrid daughter of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.
They nicknamed her 'Denny'.
Ancient child thought to be only known individual whose parents were two different species
