Quotes About Denisovan

But the real kicker came with the revelation that Denisovan DNA was alive and well in contemporary Melanesians—the indigenous people of Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and a scattering of islands off the northeast coast of Australia.

It turned out that 1–4 per cent of the unique human DNA of modern populations in the Middle East and Europe is Neanderthal DNA. That's not a huge amount, but it's significant. A second shock came several months later, when DNA extracted from the fossilised finger from Denisova was mapped. The results proved that up to 6 per cent of the unique human DNA of modern Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians is Denisovan DNA.

Viable offspring capable of reproduction resulted from all these liaisons and in August 2018, Denisova Cave obliged yet again by yielding up a bone fragment, more than 50,000 years old and in sufficiently good condition for genome sequencing. It turned out to have belonged to a female, about 13 years of age, who had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.57