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

Viviane Slon (), Fabrizio Mafessoni, Benjamin Vernot, Cesare Filippo, Steffi Grote, Bence Viola, Mateja Hajdinjak, Stéphane Peyrégne, Sarah Nagel, Samantha Brown, Katerina Douka, Tom Higham, Maxim B. Kozlikin, Michael V. Shunkov, Anatoly P. Derevianko, Janet Kelso, Matthias Meyer, Kay Prüfer and Svante Pääbo ()
Additional contact information
Viviane Slon: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Fabrizio Mafessoni: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Benjamin Vernot: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Cesare Filippo: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Steffi Grote: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Bence Viola: University of Toronto
Mateja Hajdinjak: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Stéphane Peyrégne: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Sarah Nagel: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Samantha Brown: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Katerina Douka: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Tom Higham: University of Oxford
Maxim B. Kozlikin: Russian Academy of Sciences
Michael V. Shunkov: Russian Academy of Sciences
Anatoly P. Derevianko: Russian Academy of Sciences
Janet Kelso: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Matthias Meyer: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Kay Prüfer: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Svante Pääbo: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Nature, 2018, vol. 561, issue 7721, 113-116

Abstract: Abstract Neanderthals and Denisovans are extinct groups of hominins that separated from each other more than 390,000 years ago1,2. 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 cave4–6. The mother came from a population more closely related to Neanderthals who lived later in Europe2,7 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.

Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1038/s41586-018-0455-x

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