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## On the Limits of What We Can Know
Every discipline has the limits of its methods, and ancient genomics is honest about its own. The researchers who published the Denisova 11 study were careful to distinguish what the data established from what it suggested and from what remained unknown. That care is part of what makes the study trustworthy.
The things the study established with high confidence: that this individual’s nuclear genome was approximately half Neanderthal and half Denisovan; that her mitochondrial DNA was Neanderthal-type, establishing Neanderthal maternal ancestry; that heterozygosity levels in the genome were consistent with a first-generation hybrid rather than a later-generation individual with mixed ancestry; that the father’s Denisovan genome contained traces of earlier Neanderthal ancestry; that the mother’s genome was more similar to western European Neanderthals than to the Denisova Cave Neanderthal.
The things the study established with reasonable but less certain confidence: the approximate dating of 90,000 years ago for the individual’s lifetime, which depends on stratigraphic interpretations with inherent uncertainty; the estimate of 300 to 600 generations for the age of the Neanderthal admixture in the father’s lineage, which depends on assumed generation times.
The things the study could not establish: whether Denisova 11 was fertile; whether she reproduced; whether any of her ancestry persists in living populations; what she looked like; how she lived; what caused her death; what, if anything, distinguished her from the other members of whichever group she lived with; whether she was perceived as unusual or ordinary in her social context.