Viviane Slon

Slon completed her doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.[4] She won the 2017 Dan David Prize.[5] She worked at the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University on the earliest human fossils outside Africa.[6][7] She studied the Qafzeh 9 Skull, looking at developmental malocclusions.[8]

Denisova Cave in 2008

In 2018 Slon was appointed a postdoctoral researcher working on neanderthals at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.[9] She develops techniques to remove hominin DNA from sediments.[10][11][12] Her doctoral supervisor Svante Pääbo decoded the Denisovan gene.[13][14] Slon visited the Denisova Cave during a symposium, where over one thousand bones are excavated a year.[13]

As her first project, Slon reported the DNA from the tooth of the fourth Denisova individual ever found on earth.[15][16] She also co-led a team that found Denisovan DNA in excavated dirt as an alternative to finding rare hominin bones.[3]

In 2018, Slon and her colleagues published the genome of Denny, a hybrid hominin.[17] DNA was extracted from a hominin bone found in a Middle Pleistocene layer.[13][18][19] Using genetic analysis and radiocarbon dating, the hominin was identified as a girl born more than 50,000 years ago to a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father.[13][20][21] The work was covered in BBC News, National Geographic, EurekAlert!, The Atlantic and Archaeology magazine.[22][23][24][25][26][27]

Slon was selected as one of Nature's 10 in 2018.[3]