But she wasn’t just any child. Scientists say she belonged to a species of extinct cousins of Neanderthals and modern humans known today as the Denisovans. And in a paper published Friday in the journal Science Advances, a team of paleoanthropologists reported that she is only the fourth individual of this species ever discovered.
Advances in technology revealed the victim in the 1988 case was not a woman who officials originally thought had given birth to multiple children, but instead a transgender woman who was born biologically male.