Analysis of a bone fragment found in a Siberian cave from a young female who died 90,000 years ago has revealed she was half Neanderthal and half Denisovan. Scientists already knew that Neanderthals, Denisovans, and early modern humans must have interbred because mixed DNA lingers in people today, but the new study is the first to identify a first-generation child with such parents. "A Neanderthal and a Denisovan were genetically more distant from each other than any two people living today are," study co-author Viviane Slon, a paleogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said in an email to Live Science. Bone fragment (“Denisova 11”) was found in 2012 at Denisova Cave in Russia by Russian archaeologists (T. Higham/University of Oxford)

A 40% match was found with the Denisovan, as well as a 40% match for the Neanderthal, while bone density gave away the teenager’s age. "It is striking that we find this Neanderthal/Denisovan child among the handful of ancient individuals whose genomes have been sequenced," said evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo, Director of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and senior author of the study. The thickness of the outer part of the bone suggested that Denisova 11 belonged to a female who was at least 13 years old when she died, while radiocarbon dating suggested Denisova 11 was more than 50,000 years old. “We knew from previous studies that Neandertals and Denisovans must have occasionally had children together, but I never thought we would be so lucky as to find an actual offspring of the two groups,” said Slon. The researchers also found that the Denisovan father of the individual Denisova 11 had at least one Neanderthal ancestor, possibly as far back as 300 to 600 generations before his lifetime. "An interesting aspect of this genome is that it allows us to learn things about two populations - the Neanderthals from the mother's side, and the Denisovans from the father's side," said geneticist Fabrizio Mafessoni of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. In addition, the scientists found that the teenage girl's Neanderthal mother was genetically more similar to the Neanderthals of Western Europe than to a different Neanderthal that lived earlier in Denisova Cave. And the ancient DNA shows evidence of even more blending, the researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.
A bone fragment found in Denisova Cave, Denisova 11, is identified as that of a girl who died 50,000 years ago aged at least 13. Genome-wide signatures tell that she had a Neanderthal mother and a mostly-Denisovan father. This first find of a prehistoric first-generation mixed offspring shows that different archaic human subtypes sometimes migrated, and then mixed more frequently than previously thought.