I first thought that the Denisovans were the original maternal line for humanity, i.e., the common ancestor of all modern humans. I do not think that’s the case any longer, and instead, it seems it’s literally the Romani people, who are in turn the ancestors of Heidelbergensis. Heidelbergensis seems to be the ancestor of the Phoenicians, and the Phoenicians are in turn the ancestors of the Old Kingdom Egyptians. The Old Kingdom Egyptian maternal line is literally everywhere in the world, Europe, Africa, Asia, and seems to be the defining maternal line of modern people. This is the result of more careful application of my ancestry algorithm that I describe here.

What’s strange (frankly) about the Romani people, is that they seem to have a single maternal ancestor. That is, if you apply clustering to the Romani maternal line, you find exactly one cluster, suggesting all of the maternal lines in the Romani people are basically identical. This is not a small dataset, but it’s not every living person, so it’s possible that there’s more than one. However, the bottom line is, humanity would in this hypothesis descend from either an individual maternal ancestor, or a single family.