…also, it just occurred to me, the Denisovan genome is not all that widely known at the moment, so a quick explanation of that:
Back in 2010, scientists working at the Denisova cave in Siberia found a finger bone and some teeth belonging to an early hominid. DNA was acquired from these bones and subsequently sequenced, and it turns out that they belong to a novel species of human about as far away from Homo sapiens sapiens as Neanderthals are, although the Denisovans are equidistant from both, as far as I know.
The really exciting part is that there’s pretty good population-level genetic evidence that Denisovans interbred with anatomically modern early humans, especially in Aboriginal Australian and Papua New Guinea populations. There’s a ton of really interesting things about what that genome contributed to look into now, as well as some interesting ideas on early human migrational patterns that might have happened to result in that pattern of introgression.
