Move over, Neanderthals: Our ancestors mated with Denisovans not once but twice, scientists say
Humans weren’t just making babies with Neanderthals back in the day. Denisovans, close cousins of modern humans and Neanderthals, were first described in 2010 after the discovery of a fossil finger bone from a cave in the Altai mountains in Siberia. But it’s difficult to learn a whole lot about the mark that Denisovans left on modern humans based primarily on the Altai Denisovan girl’s finger bone. So for this paper led by Sharon Browning, a biostatistician at the University of Washington in Seattle, scientists tried another approach — one that could pick out Denisovan DNA without needing an ancient genome for reference. “It was a surprise when it popped out of the results.” The scientists also found Neanderthal DNA using this method, though they didn’t find two waves the way they did with the Denisovans.
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