Mum's a Neanderthal, Dad's a Denisovan: First discovery of an ancient-human hybrid

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

3. I am currently reading the book

Who We Are and How We Got Here by David Reich which is all about this kind of thing. What is being learned from ancient DNA is completely amazing. This sentence alone, from the introduction, should make you want to read the book: A great surprise that emerges from the genome revolution is that in the relatively recent past, human populations were just as different from each other as they are today, but that the fault lines across populations were almost recognizably different from today. Wow.

Among the things that this book talks about is the possibility that in the deep past our homo sapien ancestors bred with more than one ancient, not-quite-the-same-as-us relatives. Neanderthals and Denisovans are only the two that are known to the most casual reader.