This 90,000-year-old young girl lived in the Altai Mountains from the southern side of Siberia and although she didn’t live for long, she was quite unique, to say the least as she is the only known hybrid between the Neanderthals and the Denisovans.
Her body was discovered in a nearby cave and the experts have been inspecting it nonstop since they uncovered it.
In case you didn’t know already, the Homo Sapiens weren’t the only humans on this planet as far as we know as they were also accompanied by the Neanderthals and the Denisovans thousands upon thousands of years ago.
While we do know about the Neanderthals from several venues, we’ve only actually discovered the Denisovans back in 2010.
Apparently, they completely went extinct around 40,000 years ago around the same time period as the Neanderthals and this right here is a specimen that proves that they co-existed with the Neanderthals almost 90,000 years ago.
The girl was nicknamed Denisova 11 and despite that name, she’s not the 11th discovered Denisovan, but the fifth actually. Half of her chromosomes were those of Denisovans and the other were of Neanderthals, so it was pretty easy to pinpoint her origin, to say the least.
Viviane Slon studied her and discussed that based on her mitochondrial DNA she was fathered by a Denisovan and mothered by a Neanderthal.
More and more hybrids have been found since, proving that most of history is not as it seems, since it’s pretty clear that interbreeding was a very important part of it as far as we can tell.