The catalogue number Denisova 11 is itself a scientific designation—the eleventh hominin individual identified from Denisova Cave. This number is also a post-hoc human construct, though a more explicitly analytical one. It places her in a sequence, identifies her as an individual distinct from others, and ties her to the site of her discovery without claiming to know anything about who she was.
None of these names are wrong. They are all products of the conventions of the discipline and the culture in which the discipline operates. They make communication possible. But keeping in mind that they are our names for her, not her name for herself, is part of maintaining the honesty that the study calls for.
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## Heterozygosity and the First-Generation Confirmation
Among the technical aspects of the Denisova 11 finding, one deserves more detailed explanation than it typically receives in popular accounts: the use of heterozygosity as evidence for first-generation hybrid status.
Heterozygosity, in its simplest sense, is the condition of having two different variants at a given genetic position—one inherited from each parent. At any position in the genome, an individual can be homozygous (carrying the same variant from both parents) or heterozygous (carrying different variants). The proportion of heterozygous positions in a genome reflects the genetic diversity of the individual’s ancestry: an individual whose parents were closely related will have lower heterozygosity than an individual whose parents came from distantly related populations.
Modern humans, whose ancestors have been intermixing across African and Eurasian populations for tens of thousands of years, have a heterozygosity level that reflects this extensive mixing. Present-day Africans, who have the highest ancestral diversity, have somewhat higher heterozygosity than non-African populations, reflecting the additional genetic diversity that was present in African populations before some of them dispersed.