Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ust'-Ishim man is the name given to a 45,000-year-old fossil, a single left femur, belonging to an early modern human male hunter-gatherer found in western Siberia. The bone had intact DNA, which allowed scientists to fully sequence one of the oldest modern human genomes ever decoded.
Russian sculptor Nikolai Peristov, who specializes in carving mammoth ivory, discovered the femur in 2008 protruding from the bank of the Irtysh River. He showed it to a forensic investigator who suggested it might be human, and it was later named after the Ust-Ishimsky District of Siberia where it was found.
Carbon dating placed the fossil at 45,000 years old, making it the oldest human fossil dated by that method. It was examined and its genome sequenced by paleoanthropologists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Ust'-Ishim man's genome contains Neanderthal DNA in long, unbroken clusters rather than the short, broken fragments found in most modern humans, indicating he lived shortly after humans and Neanderthals interbred. That evidence helped narrow the estimated date of the interbreeding to between 52,000-58,000 years ago.
Ust'-Ishim man carried Y-DNA haplogroup K-M2308 and mitochondrial haplogroup R*, which differs from the root R sequence by a single mutation. Both haplogroups and their descendant subclades are now found across Eurasia, Oceania, and the Americas, though no population today descends directly from his specific lineages.
A 2016 study found that modern Tibetans share the most alleles with Ust'-Ishim man, while a 2017 study reported that Siberian and East Asian populations shared 38% of their ancestry with him. He was equally related to modern East Asians, Oceanians, and certain ancient West Eurasian populations such as the Goyet specimen, but modern Europeans trace closer ties to other ancient remains.