Mayank Chhaya-
Scientists have found for the first time a family of Neanderthals, long regarded as a species rivaling homo sapiens, that lived some 54,000 years ago.
The family consists of a father, his teenage daughter and others likely close cousins. The find was led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. They “managed to sequence multiple individuals from a remote Neandertal community in Siberia. Among these thirteen individuals, the researchers identified multiple related individuals – among these a father and his teenage daughter,” the institute said.
“The researchers were also able to use the thirteen genomes to provide a glimpse into the social organization of a Neandertal community. They appear to have been a small group of close relatives, consisting of ten to twenty members, and communities were primarily connected through female migration,” it said.
Among these remains were those of a Neandertal father and his teenage daughter. The researchers also found a pair of second-degree relatives: a young boy and an adult female, perhaps a cousin, aunt or grandmother. The combination of heteroplasmies and related individuals strongly suggests that the Neandertals in Chagyrskaya Cave must have lived – and died – at around the same time.
“The fact that they were living at the same time is very exciting. This means that they likely came from the same social community. So, for the first time, we can use genetics to study the social organization of a Neandertal community,” says Laurits Skov, who is first author on this study.
“Our study provides a concrete picture of what a Neandertal community may have looked like”, says Benjamin Peter, the last author of the study. “It makes Neandertals seem much more human to me.”
Since the publication of the first Neandertal draft genome in 2010 researchers from the institute have sequenced 18 more genomes from 14 different archaeological sites throughout Eurasia. “While these genomes have provided insights into the broader strokes of Neandertal history, we still know little of individual Neandertal communities,” the institute said.
The focus on southern Siberia was prompted by the fact it has been very productive for ancient DNA research, which includes the discovery of Denisovan hominin remains at the famous Denisova Cave.
“From work done at that site, we know that Neandertals and Denisovans were present in this region over hundreds of thousands of years, and that Neandertals and Denisovans have interacted with each other – as the finding of a child with a Denisovan father and a Neandertal mother has shown,’ the institute said.
In their new study, the researchers focused on the Neandertal remains in Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov Caves, which are within 100 kilometers of Denisova Cave. Neandertals briefly occupied these sites around 54,000 years ago, and multiple potentially contemporaneous Neandertal remains had been recovered from their deposits. The researchers successfully retrieved DNA from 17 Neandertal remains – the largest number of Neandertal remains ever sequenced in a single study.
“Chagyrskaya Cave has been excavated over the last 14 years by researchers from the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences. Besides several hundred thousand stone tools and animal bones, they also recovered more than 80 bone and tooth fragments of Neandertals, one of the largest assemblages of these fossil humans not only in the region but also in the world,” it said.
The Neandertals at Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov hunted ibex, horses, bison and other animals that migrated through the river valleys that the caves overlook. They collected raw materials for their stone tools dozens of kilometers away, and the occurrence of the same raw material at both Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov Caves also supports the genetic data that the groups inhabiting these localities were closely linked.
