Mum's a Neanderthal, Dad's a Denisovan: First discovery of an ancient-human hybrid

[jpak]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06004-0

A female who died around 90,000 years ago was half Neanderthal and half Denisovan, according to genome analysis of a bone discovered in a Siberian cave. This is the first time scientists have identified an ancient individual whose parents belonged to distinct human groups. The findings were published on 22 August in Nature1.

“To find a first-generation person of mixed ancestry from these groups is absolutely extraordinary,” says population geneticist Pontus Skoglund at the Francis Crick Institute in London. “It’s really great science coupled with a little bit of luck.”

The team, led by palaeogeneticists Viviane Slon and Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, conducted the genome analysis on a single bone fragment recovered from Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Russia. This cave lends its name to the ‘Denisovans’, a group of extinct humans first identified on the basis of DNA sequences from the tip of a finger bone discovered2 there in 2008. The Altai region, and the cave specifically, were also home to Neanderthals.

Given the patterns of genetic variation in ancient and modern humans, scientists already knew that Denisovans and Neanderthals must have bred with each other — and with Homo sapiens (See 'Tangled Tree'). But no one had previously found the first-generation offspring from such pairings, and Pääbo says that he questioned the data when his colleagues first shared them. “I thought they must have screwed up something.” Before the discovery of the Neanderthal–Denisovan individual, whom the team has affectionately named Denny, the best evidence for so close an association was found in the DNA of a Homo sapiens specimen who had a Neanderthal ancestor within the previous 4–6 generations3.

<more>

[hedda_foil]

1. Wow, jmak, this is amazing! It's an incredibly lucky find.

[GeoWilliam750]

2. Wow. Just WOW!

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. I am currently reading the book

Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich which is all about this kind of thing. What is being learned from ancient DNA is completely amazing. This sentence alone, from the introduction, should make you want to read the book: A great surprise that emerges from the genome revolution is that in the relatively recent past, human populations were just as different from each other as they are today, but that the fault lines across populations were almost recognizably different from today. Wow.

Among the things that this book talks about is the possibility that in the deep past our homo sapien ancestors bred with more than one ancient, not-quite-the-same-as-us relatives. Neanderthals and Denisovans are only the two that are known to the most casual reader.

[nitpicker]

4. Link to DW

https://www.dw.com/en/fossil-females-mom-was-neanderthal-but-dad-was-denisovan/a-45189578

[Judi Lynn]

5. Exciting news! 90,000 years ago. Wow. Please scan these images from the dig site area:

https://tinyurl.com/yaablo7o

This is such a breakthrough.

Thank you, so much.