This concreteness has interpretive implications that go beyond the immediate finding. Population genetics had already shown that Denisovan genomes contain traces of Neanderthal ancestry, and that this ancestry was widespread enough in Denisovan populations to appear in multiple Denisovan individuals sequenced from Denisova Cave. The inference was that Neanderthals and Denisovans had interbred somewhere in their shared history. Denisova 11 does not prove this inference—the population-level evidence already established it firmly—but she illustrates it with a specificity that no population-level statistic can match.
Similarly, the earlier Neanderthal ancestry in the father’s Denisovan genome was not a surprise given existing population genetics data. But tracing it to a specific lineage—the father of a known individual—connects what was previously an abstract population phenomenon to a concrete family history. The Denisovan father of Denisova 11 carried, in his genome, the traces of encounters that had happened in his ancestors’ lives, not in his own. He was, unknowingly, the living evidence of a past that neither he nor anyone around him could have known in the way we know it now.
—
## What the Genome Cannot Tell About Identity
There is an important tension at the heart of the Denisova 11 story, one that the science is quite honest about even when popular accounts sometimes are not.
The categories “Neanderthal” and “Denisovan” are categories that scientists created. They are names applied after the fact to populations of people who did not use those names or, as far as we know, think of themselves in those categorical terms. The people who are now classified as Neanderthals were people who lived in groups, had relationships, occupied territories, made things, and interacted with the environments and other groups around them. They did not know they were Neanderthals. They did not know they would be defined, tens of thousands of years later, by the shape of their skulls and the sequence of their genomes.