Bones found in cave: Why this 'love child' who died 90,000 years ago has become the darling of scientists
There is something very romantic about children born out of discreet liaisons between women and men — the accompanying hush-hush about a man's 'betrayal', a woman hopelessly in love, a relationship which had no future, and the custodians of public morality, relishing every bit of the couple's misery. Years later, when the love child is discovered, all hell breaks loose. Never-heard-before stories about the relationship buried in its grave suddenly comes alive with juicy gossip. If it involves a celebrity, God forbid, there is no other news but the child.
Romantics call it a 'love child', the cynics damn it as a 'bastard'. A 'love child', actually, is more of a crisis situation than a living, breathing human being. Some approve of it. Most don't, but almost everybody is intrigued about its past, how it came into being, and how it will manage its future.
The world has recently discovered yet another love child — a 13-year-old girl — we didn't know existed.
This one is special because she was born out of love-making between two individuals about 90,013 years ago.
Well, this is how the story about the child's fairly unusual past goes.
Denny's mother was a Neanderthal, a sub-human species that existed until 40,000 years ago. But her father was a Denisovan, a distinct species of primitive human that also roamed the Eurasian continent 50,000 years ago.
So, Denny, they (the scientists) tell us, was an inter-species love child.
Her fascinating story was reported by the journal Nature. And, unlike the usual celebrity love-children stories splashed across the heartless tabloids, Denny has become the darling of the scientist community. She has been nicknamed Denny by Oxford University scientists. Her official name is Denisova 11. The little girl's story tugs at your heartstrings — believed to be 13 when she died, the reasons for her death are yet unknown.
Notwithstanding the curiosity involved, Denny's birth and death have also established the first direct link between the interbreeding of different hominins (early forms of human).
According to the lead author of the study, Viviane Slon, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, “There was earlier evidence of interbreeding between different hominin, or early human, groups, but this is the first time that we have found a direct, first-generation offspring.”
Denny’s startling 'pedigree', as reported here and here, was unlocked from a bone fragment unearthed in 2012 by Russian archeologists at the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia.
Analysis of the bone’s DNA has reoprtedly confirmed that the chromosomes were a 50-50 mix of Neanderthal and Denisovan, two different species that split apart between 4,00,000 to 5,00,000 years ago.
“I initially thought that they must have screwed up in the lab,” said senior author and Max Planck Institute professor Svante Paabo was quoted by an AFP report. Paabo was the one who identified the first Denisovan a decade ago at the same site.
Scientists say that fewer than two dozen early human genomes from before 40,000 years ago — Neanderthal, Denisovan, Homo sapiens — have been sequenced, and the chances of stumbling on a half-and-half hybrid seemed vanishingly small.
But there is much possibility that's not entirely true.
“The very fact that we found this individual of mixed Neanderthal and Denisovan origins suggests that they interbred much more often than we thought,” Slon was quoted as saying.
Paabo couldn't agree more: “They must have quite commonly had kids together, otherwise we wouldn’t have been this lucky.”
But apart from scientific history and the subsequent human evolution, the fact that two sub-species — a Neanderthal and a Denisovan, in Slon's words, who were genetically more distant from each other than any two living people today are — can interbreed shouldn't ideally surprise us so much. Well, at least not the modern-day human beings known for our "hanky-panky" relationship status.
While we may not have dropped the idea totally, did we not know that modern humans didn't originate from a single population in a single location? Or maybe, we never cared to find out.
But what is also true is we don't believe in anything until proven scientifically. Sometimes even scientific evidence is not enough to conquer our prejudices and deeply entrenched biases about our 'superior race' and 'pure blood'. Another reason for this is that although we find such studies and evidence fascinating, we don't look at them beyond their scientific value.
And that is why, for us, the tale of human evolution is more of a 'science' story and not our own world — the world that we live in, the world that we have created and the creations that we are destroying.
Centuries of work by social and physical anthropologists have failed to make us understand how we came into being and where we are headed. It's sad how such valuable work about human evolution has failed to evolve us as humans intellectually and emotionally. In fact, what is more fascinating is rather how we use these studies to travel back eons, only to establish that our present-day prejudices are justified.
Scientific studies about how groups of primitive humans underwent a series of genetic and cultural shifts are meaningless unless we understand that every society, every generation undergoes cultural shifts, which would naturally lead to socio-political and socio-economic changes. It is exactly these cultural shifts that set primitive humans on a unique evolutionary path that has resulted in us — everyone who is alive today.
Then why do we want everyone to be either like us — or not to exist?
Why can't we shun our cultural and racial hegemonies, our nationalistic delusions? Why do some people still have to fight with others to be treated like everyone else? Why is 'diversity' such a difficult concept to understand and accept?
Scientists insist that "only after tens or hundreds of thousands of years of interbreeding and cultural exchange between semi-isolated groups, did the fully fledged modern human come into being".
Strange how we are still averse to such exchanges.
Maybe little Denny's story will melt our hearts and open our eyes to a certain reality about homo sapiens — make love, not war with the 'others'.