“When the results first popped up, paleogeneticist Viviane Slon didn’t believe it. “What went wrong?” she recalls asking herself at the time. Her mind immediately turned to the analysis. Did she make a mistake? Could the sample be contaminated? The data was telling her that the roughly 90,000-year-old flake of bone she had tested was from a teenager that had a Neanderthal mom and Denisovan dad.” (I don’t want to cast aspersions, but seriously, those Neanderthals will go for almost anyone…) NatGeo: Ancient Girl’s Parents Were Two Different Human Species.