A Dad named Denis(ova)

Not an actual picture of the individual in question

Fascinating – working in the Russian cave where bones of Denisovans were first found, a team from Svante Pääbo’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has discovered a fragment of bone from a 13-year-old girl who lived 50,000 years ago … and while her mother was Neanderthal, her father was a Denisovan (who himself had some Neanderthal ancestry). Since there are bone fragments from both species in the cave, the suggestion is that there was regular interbreeding.

As Salman Rushdie wisely reminds us somewhere, “we are all mongrels.”