Updated August 23, 2018 11:51:41

Photo: The Russian Altai region was home to a melting pot of early human species (Wikipedia Commons)

Scientists have uncovered the first known child to parents of different species of ancient humans.

A small bone fragment discovered in a Siberian cave has been identified as belonging to a girl with a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father.

The two extinct groups of humans differ far more than any two present-day groups of people but are our closest ancient human relatives. The study, published in Nature, gives a rare insight into their lives.

The team, led by palaeogeneticists Viviane Slon and Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, conducted the genome analysis on the bone fragment uncovered in the Denisova Cave in Russia.

"We knew from previous studies that Neanderthals and Denisovans must have occasionally had children together," Dr Slon told Nature.

"But I never thought we would be so lucky as to find an actual offspring of the two groups."

Very few — less than 20 early human ancestors — have had their genomes sequenced.

"It is striking that we find this Neanderthal/Denisovan child among the handful of ancient individuals whose genomes have been sequenced," said Dr Pääbo.

"Neanderthals and Denisovans may not have had many opportunities to meet. But when they did, they must have mated frequently — much more so than we previously thought."

Photo: DNA tests on the bone fragments show they belong to the child of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father (T. Higham, University of Oxford)

The study also revealed that the Denisovan father had at least one Neanderthal ancestor.

"So from this single genome, we are able to detect multiple instances of interactions between Neanderthals and Denisovans," said Benjamin Vernot from the MPI-EVA, a third co-author of the study.

The Denisova cave lends its name to the Denisovans, who were first identified by a fingertip found within the cave in 2008.

The fingertip was the first of a string of notable archaeological discoveries to be found within the cave. A Denisovan tooth was found in 2010, and bone in 2013, that suggested early Europeans were more closely related to Denisovans than Neanderthals.

Scientists already knew that Neanderthals, Denisovans, and early modern humans must have interbred because mixed DNA lingers in people today, but the new study is the first to identify a first-generation child with such parents.

The two species lived until about 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east, however the cave — and the wider Altai region — are known to have been home to both groups.

The study shows that Neanderthals migrated between western and eastern Europe and Asia tens of thousands of years before they died out.

Topics: human-interest, anatomy, archaeology, dna-testing, forensic-science, genetics, cloning-and-dna, palaeontology, russian-federation

First posted August 23, 2018 11:08:15