Madrid. For the first time, 13 individuals from a remote Neanderthal community in Siberia have been sequenced, among whom are related people: a father and his teenage daughter.
An international team led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology was also able to use the 13 genomes to give insight into the social organization of a Neanderthal community, which appears to have been a small group of close relatives, consisting of 10 to 20 members. ; In addition, it was connected mainly through female migration, according to what they publish in Nature.
The first draft of the Neanderthal genome was published in 2010, and since then researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany have sequenced another 18 genomes from 14 different sites in Eurasia. While that material has provided insight into the broad lines of the history of that species, little is still known about the individual communities.
To explore social structure, the researchers turned their attention to southern Siberia, a region that has been very fruitful for ancient DNA research, including the discovery of Denisovan hominin remains in Denisova Cave. Thanks to the work carried out in that place, we know that these two species were present in this region for hundreds of thousands of years, and that they interacted with each other, as has been shown by the discovery of a child of a Denisovan father and a Neanderthal mother.
In their new study, the researchers focused on Neanderthal remains from the Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov caves, which are less than 100 kilometers from the Denisova cave. These men briefly occupied these places about 54,000 years ago, and multiple potentially contemporary fossils have been recovered from their sites. The researchers recovered DNA from 17 remains, the largest number of remains of that species ever sequenced in a single study.
The Chagyrskaya cave has been excavated over the past 14 years by researchers from the Institute of Archeology and Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In addition to several hundred thousand stone tools and animal bones, they also recovered more than 80 Neanderthal bone and tooth fragments, one of the largest assemblages of Neanderthal fossil humans in the region and the world.
“So, for the first time, we can use genetics to study the social organization of a Neanderthal community,” says Laurits Skov, first author of this study, in a statement.
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