The person is Michael Le Page.

Chagyrskaya Cave in Siberia

There is a cave in Siberia.

Skov and his team of researchers.

The social structure of Neanderthals has been revealed by their ancient DNA. It suggests that their women moved between groups.

Benjamin Peter, a team member at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, said that they have tried to work out what the social structure of Neanderthal groups was like from evidence such as the layout of caves. Peter says that this is the first time that genetics have been used to do something like this.

He and his colleagues were able to recover 15 out of 17 pieces of bone or teeth from the Chagyrskaya cave. Several teenagers and children are included in the 11 people who were found with the same pieces.

The Neanderthals are thought to have lived in the cave between 51,000 and 59,000 years ago, while the bison bones show they were related. Peter believes that they probably lived at the same time.

There are two people among the remains. The father has a common female Ancestor, such as the same grandmother, because they share the same Mitochondrial DNA.

The woman might be the grandmother or aunt of the man if she is a second- degree relative. The team doesn't have enough of their genetic material to make a decision.

Peter thinks it is possible that these people all died at the same time. He says there are no graves.

The Neanderthal population in the area is thought to be very small due to the high level of inbreeding found in the genetic material. Peter said it was very unusual. There is only one thing that is comparable and that is the critically-endangered gorilla.

The team can't say if high levels of inbreeding affected the health of these individuals. It's possible that it's an isolated group on the edge of the range of Neanderthals.

Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in the UK was not part of the team.

The diversity of Y chromosomes was compared with the diversity of Mitochondrial DNA. Peter said that they found an order of magnitude more diversity. He doesn't know where we would see that.

It's possible that men stayed in the same group where they were born but that women moved to different groups.

Read more: Traces of mystery ancient humans found lurking in our genomes

There is evidence for female-based migration in the El Sidrn site in northern Spain. It's possible that this was a common pattern in Neanderthals.

The 10 samples from the nearby Okladnikov cave were only obtained from two people. The Chagyrskaya group didn't have anything to do with these.

The research team included Svante Pbo, who won a prize for his discoveries about human evolution and the genomes of extinct humans.

Nature is a journal.

The revolution in archaeology and human evolution is covered in Our Human Story.

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