The same is true of Denisovans—even more so, since Denisovans are a category defined entirely by genetic analysis. No one identified as Denisovan during their lifetime. The populations we call Denisovans occupied, across their hundreds of thousands of years of existence, a range of environments and developed, presumably, internal cultural and social distinctions that are entirely invisible to us. The Denisovan who was Denisova 11’s father may have been from a group that thought of itself in terms that had nothing to do with the genetic clusters we identify from sequenced genomes.
This matters for how we interpret what the genome tells us about Denisova 11 herself. The genome tells us that she had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father in the sense that those words are used by paleogeneticists: that her maternal-side chromosomes cluster with Neanderthal genomes and her paternal-side chromosomes cluster with Denisovan genomes. What it does not tell us is how she thought of herself, how others thought of her, or whether the biological distinction that is now legible in her genome was perceived as meaningful by anyone around her.
She may have grown up in a group that was entirely Denisovan except for her mother. She may have grown up in a group that was mixed in ways the archaeological record cannot fully capture. She may have had siblings of similar ancestry, or she may have been unusual in her specific parentage even in her immediate community. None of this is knowable from one bone fragment.