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## An Object Lesson in What Evidence Can Do
The Denisova 11 case offers, finally, an object lesson in the relationship between evidence and inference that is worth making explicit.
Before the analysis was done, the question “Did Neanderthals and Denisovans ever produce first-generation hybrid offspring?” could not be answered with certainty. There were strong reasons to expect that it had happened—the population-level genetic evidence strongly implied it—but the evidence was indirect. The answer to the question, in 2017 before the sequencing was complete, was: probably yes, but we can’t show you one.
After the analysis, the question had a direct, specific answer: yes, and here she is. This is the difference between inference and observation, and it matters in ways that go beyond the particular question of Neanderthal-Denisovan hybridization.
Indirect evidence and direct evidence are different kinds of evidence. Both can be compelling. Both can be wrong. But direct evidence of a specific individual, with a specific genome, from a specific place and time, is qualitatively different from a statistical inference about populations. The statistical inference might be wrong in ways that more data would eventually reveal. The specific individual is real and specific in ways that are no longer subject to the same kind of uncertainty.
This is, in the end, what the bone fragment achieved by surviving 90,000 years and being found, identified, and sequenced. It turned an inference into an observation. It turned a statistical probability into a documented person. It moved one question—did this happen?—from the realm of the strongly expected to the realm of the directly confirmed.