Third human species? The story of a Denisovan father and a Neanderthal mother

Neanderthals are an extinct subspecies of humans that went extinct 40,000 years ago. Today, only 2% of Eurasians have Neanderthal DNA.

But there are more species of humans that existed thousands of years ago. A few recent discoveries have found a third species of ancient human that might have contributed to our ancestry. But how is that possible, and what happened to them?

In southern Siberia, Russia, there is a cave near the Altai Mountains called the Denisova Cave. It was named after an 18th-century hermit who lived there. In 2008, archaeologists from the Russian Academy of Sciences unearthed several bone fragments there.

Scientists dated the oldest bones to at least 51,000 years ago. But it was not a Neanderthal or Homo sapien; researchers from the Max Planck Institute announced that it was a new species of human, the Denisovan.

[Researcher Samantha] Brown discovered that this human fragment was a unique result of interbreeding. The person was part Neanderthal and part Denisovan. If her results were accurate, then this would be the first evidence of first-generation breeding between two human species.

…

This bone was indeed the first-ever Denisovan-Neanderthal hybrid discovered. “My first reaction was disbelief,” [Viviane] Slon later admitted. The chances of finding a first-generation interbred human are especially low.

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