Nature paper on Denisova 11 published today

We were very excited today see the publication of our Denisova 11 paper in Nature, and the beautiful cover art that accompanied it.

The cover art was conceived during the final submission of the revised paper. All accepted Nature articles are invited to consider possible cover photographs or designs, and encouraged to submit them. We decided to work with our colleague Annette Günzel, a brilliant graphic designer and artist, on this. She produced some initial designs and we bounced around some suggestions, and in the end submitted several variations on the image on the left. We were really thrilled that Nature decided to go with this one. As you can see it beautifully summarises the results of the research; the genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father, with the DNA double helix; red for Denisovan and blue for Neanderthal, unwrapping as it follows the arms upwards, almost like a tattoo. In the background one can see Eurasia, coloured in a similar way, referring to the possible geographic distribution of the two groups.

Congratulations to Annette, and the entire team!

You can find a link to the final published paper below:

Slon, V., Mafessoni, F., Vernot, B., de Filippo, C., Grote, S., Viola, B., Hajdinjak, M., Peyrégne, S., Nagel, S., Brown, S., Douka, K., Higham, T., Kozlikin, M.B., Shunkov, M.V., Derevianko, A.P., Kelso, J., Meyer, M., Prüfer, K. and Pääbo, S. 2018. The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal/ mother and a Denisovan father. Nature 561(7721): 113–116.