Denisova 11’s bone, from layer 12 at approximately 90,000 years ago, falls within the overlap period. This is consistent with the encounter her genome implies. But the cave itself cannot tell us where her parents met. It tells us only that she died—or that her bone ended up—in this cave.
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## What Remains Unknown
The Denisova 11 study resolved a question about one individual’s ancestry with a precision that would have seemed impossible a generation ago. What it could not do was resolve most of the questions a person might want to ask about this individual’s life.
We do not know where Denisova 11 was born. We do not know where her parents were born. We do not know how or where her parents encountered each other—whether they were members of groups that regularly occupied the same territory, whether one of them had traveled into the other’s range, or whether the meeting was a circumstance whose frequency or rarity we cannot assess. The cave where her bone was found is where she ended up, not necessarily where she lived most of her life.
We do not know how she died. The fragment is too small and too uninformative—an unidentified long-bone splinter—to reveal cause of death. We do not know whether she had children of her own. We do not know whether she was accepted by the group she lived with, or what that group’s composition was. These are questions that no bone fragment, however informatively analyzed, can answer.