In a study by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, published in the journal “Nature”, researchers were able to determine that the bone remains found in a cave in southern Siberia come from early humans who are related to each other. This is the first time such kinship relationships have been demonstrated among Neanderthals.
For the published study, Dr. Laurits Skov and his colleagues obtained and analyzed genetic data from the remains of 11 Neanderthals from Chagyrskaya Cave and two from Okladnikov Cave in the Altai Mountains. These were already discovered in the 1980s and 2007.
First author Laurits Skov from the Max Planck Institute: “The fact that they lived at the same time is very exciting. This means they likely came from the same social community. So for the first time we can use genetics to study the social organization of a Neanderthal community.”
It is the largest known genetic study of Neanderthals to date. These 13 people were seven men and six women, eight adults and five children and adolescents. They included a Neanderthal father and his teenage daughter, and two second-degree relatives: a young boy and an adult woman. These two could be cousins, aunt and nephew, or grandmother and grandson.
Neanderthal remains have been recovered from numerous caves in western Eurasia, an area occupied by these early humans from about 430,000 years ago until their extinction 40,000 years ago. Until now, it has been impossible to say whether Neanderthals found in specific locations belonged to communities or not. The current study is therefore a milestone for research.
“Neanderthal remains in general, and remains with conserved DNA in particular, are extremely rare,” said Benjamin Peter, lead author of the study in Leipzig. “We tend to get single individuals from locations that are often thousands of kilometers and tens of thousands of years apart.”
It was found that the genetic diversity of the Y chromosomes, which pass down the male line, was much less than that of the mitochondrial DNA inherited from mothers. This suggests that the communities were linked primarily through female migration, and that at least 60 percent of women moved to their partners’ families while the men stayed.
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