Jingszo !

In 1950, researchers found a skull and spine fragments at the bottom of a Czech cave called Zlatý kůň. Stone tools and mammal fossils found nearby suggested the bones were very old, and the skull’s shape led archaeologists to guess it belonged to a woman. Her age was a mystery, however, as the organic glue conservators had used to piece her bones together threw off radiocarbon dating techniques.

Now, researchers have found her relatives by analyzing DNA from the bones of six individuals buried in a German cave called Ranis 230 kilometers away. The findings, out this week in Nature, pin down when the Zlatý kůň woman lived to about 45,000 years ago and shed light on the remarkably mobile lifestyle of the earliest groups of modern humans to enter Europe. And the new data add to evidence that soon after modern humans left Africa, just a few thousand years earlier, they began extensive, enduring trysts with Neanderthals, the human cousins who had occupied Europe for hundreds of thousands of years.