The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.

Abstract

Neanderthals and Denisovans are extinct groups of hominins that separated from each other more than 390,000 years ago^1,2. Here we present the genome of 'Denisova 11', a bone fragment from Denisova Cave (Russia)³ and show that it comes from an individual who had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. The father, whose genome bears traces of Neanderthal ancestry, came from a population related to a later Denisovan found in the cave^4-6. The mother came from a population more closely related to Neanderthals who lived later in Europe^2,7 than to an earlier Neanderthal found in Denisova Cave⁸, suggesting 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 suggests that mixing between Late Pleistocene hominin groups was common when they met.