Neanderthals are thought to have lived in small groups. S Plailly and E Daynes were credited.
The Chagyrskaya Cave is set on a rocky outcrop. It was home to a family of Neanderthals.
For the first time, researchers have identified a set of Neanderthals, including a father and his daughter.
The first discovery of an ancient-human hybrid is a mother and father.
The largest cache of Neanderthal genomes was found in the same cave with seven other individuals and two more from a nearby site. Neanderthal communities were small and females frequently left their families to join new groups according to the findings.
Gleaning insights into kinship and social structure is a new area of study for ancient-genome studies. It's amazing that we can do this with Neanderthals.
Denisova Cave, an archaeological treasure trove in which humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and at least one Neanderthal–Denisovan hybrid are all present, is 100 kilometres west of Chagyrskaya. Neanderthal remains, dating to between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago, and stone tools, have been found in the Chagyrskaya excavations.
A genome sequence from a female Neanderthal suggested she was from a different population than the one that occupied Denisova Cave. To study the cave's inhabitants in greater depth, a team of researchers led by paleogeneticist Laurits Skov and population geneticist Benjamin Peter at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, extract DNA from 17 other ancient-human remains from Chagyrskaya
A geneticist is the winner of the medicine prize.
The Chagyrskaya remains yielded complete and partial genomes from 11 people, but only two of them had enough genetic material to complete their genomes.
The researchers found that Chagyrskaya's residents were related to Neanderthals living in Europe around the same time as Denisova Cave.
He was surprised when he started comparing the genomes from Chagyrskaya. Two people, an adult male and a teenage female, share half of their genes, but only if they are siblings or a parent. Mitochondrial DNA, which is maternally inherited, is identical between siblings and between a mother and child, but not between a father and child. The male and female looked like they were father and daughter.
The researchers were able to find more family members. They found that the father had two types of heteroplasmy that were shared by two other adults from the cave, suggesting that they were all from the same maternal line. The three most likely lived around the same time. The Neanderthal family had a male and female who were second degree relatives.
It makes you wonder what the relationship between these people was like. It's a glimpse into a family of Neanderthals.
Researchers have been able to look at other parts of Neanderthal life because of the large amount of Neanderthal genomes. The Chagyrskaya Neanderthals had low diversity between maternal and paternal copies, a sign that the population was low. Similar patterns have been found in mountain gorillas, which live in communities of less than 20 people.
Neanderthal ancestry is revealed by the oldest DNA from a Homosapien.
The Y-chromosomes that are passed down along the male line were more diverse than the maternally inherited mitochondrial genomes. The influx of females from different Neanderthal communities is one reason for this. If more than half of women in small communities were born elsewhere, there would be more genetic diversity.
Carles Lalueza-Fox is the director of the Natural Sciences Museum of Barcelona, Spain. A decade ago, his team analysed 12 Neanderthals buried in a Spanish cave and found diverse mitochondrial DNA in women, but not in men, which they thought was proof that females had left their communities. It makes Lalueza-Fox wonder if Neanderthal women were the ones who had sex with Homo sapiens in other parts of the world. Neanderthal groups may have adopted different social customs, according to other scientists. You can't tell until you get more points on the board.
The remains of many related individuals who were part of a mobile hunter-gathering community have been recovered from a single site. The presence of one baby tooth and two barely worn permanent teeth is puzzling. She thinks that the community of Neanderthals may stay in their sites for a long time or revisit them often.
Neanderthals may have had a great-grandparent.
The Chagyrskaya Cave is full of bison and horse remains, which are thought to have been used as a hunting camp. The hunts could have made it possible for different Neanderthal communities to meet. Neanderthals didn't plan to meet up with each other, but it gives them the chance.
The Chagyrskaya family is going to get bigger. Only one-third of the cave has been excavated so far, and only a small portion of the Neanderthal remains have been analysed. Future studies may be able to find the teenage girl's mother. He1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556
It was published in the peer-reviewed journal, https://doi.org/10.1038.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
