Hybrid Genome

           In The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father, the authors analyze the genome of ‘Denisova 11’, a bone fragment from Denisova Cave in Siberia.  They show that it comes from an individual who had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. The father, whose genome contains traces of Neanderthal ancestry, came from a population related to a later Denisovan found in the cave. The mother came from a population more closely related to Neanderthals who lived later in Europe than to an earlier Neanderthal found in Denisova Cave, indicating that migrations of Neanderthals between eastern and western Eurasia occurred sometime after 120,000 years ago. The finding of a first-generation Neanderthal–Denisovan offspring among the small number of archaic specimens sequenced to date allowed the authors to conclude that mixing between Late Pleistocene hominin groups was common when they met. (Slon et al. 2018)