The first draft genome of Neanderthals was published. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have been analyzing the genomes from 14 different archaeological sites. We still don't know much about individual Neanderthal communities.
In order to explore the social structure of Neanderthals, the researchers turned their attention to southern Siberia, a region that has previously been very productive for ancient DNA research. Neanderthals and Denisovans were present in the area over hundreds of thousands of years, and the finding of a child with a Denisovan father and a Neanderthal mother shows that.
The community of Neanderthals is the first of its kind.
The remains of Neanderthals can be found within 100 kilometers of Denisova Cave. Neanderthals briefly occupied these sites around 54,000 years ago. 17 Neanderthal remains are the largest number of remains ever analyzed in a single study.
Researchers from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences excavated Chagyrskaya Cave for 14 years. More than 80 bone and tooth fragments of Neanderthals, one of the largest assemblages of these fossil humans not only in the region but also in the world, were recovered along with hundreds of thousands of stone tools and animal bones.
The caves overlook the river valleys where the Neanderthals hunted animals. The occurrence of the same raw material at both Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov Caves supports the genetic data that the groups in these localities were closely related to.
Neanderthals were present in the Altai mountains as far back as 130,000 years ago, according to previous studies. The Neanderthals from Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov Caves are not related to European Neanderthals according to genetic data. The stone tools from Chagyrskaya Cave are similar to those found in Germany and Eastern Europe.
The remains of 13 Neanderthals came from 7 men and 6 women. Several so-called heteroplasmies were found in the researchers' genetic material. There is a special kind of genetic variant that only lasts for a short period of time.
Neanderthals from the eastern part of the world.
A father and daughter were among the remains. A young boy and an adult female were also found by the researchers. Neanderthals are thought to have lived and died at the same time in Chagyrskaya Cave.
They were living at the same time. It's possible that they came from the same community. For the first time, genetics can be used to study the social organization of Neanderthals.
The group size of 10 to 20 individuals is consistent with the low genetic diversity found in the Neanderthal community. This is lower than any ancient or present-day human community, and is similar to the group sizes of the threatened species.
Neanderthals lived in some communities.
They found that the genetic diversity of the Neanderthals was much higher than that of the Y chromosomes. The researchers found no evidence of Denisovan genes in the Chagyrskaya Neanderthals in the last 20,000 years.
Benjamin Peter, the last author of the study, says the study gives a concrete picture of what a Neanderthal community might have looked like. Neanderthals seem more human to me, because of it.
More information: Laurits Skov, Genetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05283-y. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05283-y Journal information: Nature
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