Discovery of prehistoric child with parents of different species

The discovery was announced on Wednesday, August 22, by researchers at the University of Oxford, who sequenced the DNA of Denny.

The girl Denny died at the age of 13, in the interior of Russia, inside a cave. She had everything to remain anonymous forever. And almost stayed, were 90,000 years hidden from the world until, by 2016, she had her bones found by scientists. Now, two years later, Denny is into the stories, and because of his parents. She is the first hominid daughter of two different species.

The discovery was announced on Wednesday, August 22, by researchers at the University of Oxford, who sequenced the DNA of Denny. This was made possible by a small bone, which belonged to one of the prehistoric girl's fingers and contained enough genetic material for analysis.

The results revealed that Denny had 50 percent DNA from a Neanderthal woman, and 50 percent of the genetics of a Denisovan man. It is the fruit of a union that says a lot about our most remote past.

We almost caught them during the act, joked the scientist Svante, one of the authors of the study, in an interview with Nature.

Denny is further proof that before we are the humans we see in the mirror, hominid creatures procreated among themselves, creating hybrids that helped our evolution. Exactly so it is possible to find up to 3 percent of Neanderthal genes in some humans.

There are very few bones of cataloged Denisovans. And if even a small sample could find a direct descendant of an inter-species relationship, this may suggest that sexual encounters of this type were more common than previously thought.

Science had discovered a descendant of Homo sapiens with Neanderthals, but it was not a direct son-but a remote descendant, four to six generations away from the original hybrid. A direct descendant is something so unexpected that initially, not even the researchers believed in the discovery.