Genetic findings from Siberian caves give glimpse into Neanderthal life
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[October 20, 2022]
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Bone and tooth
remnants from two Siberian caves are helping scientists for the first
time decipher the social organization of our cousins the Neanderthals
through genetic sleuthing, including on the remains of a father and his
teenage daughter.
Researchers on Wednesday described genomic findings from the remains of
13 Neanderthals - 11 from Chagyrskaya cave and two from Okladnikov cave
in the Altai Mountains of Russia - in one of the largest genetic studies
of a Neanderthal population to date. The Paleolithic remains date to
about 54,000 years ago.
Piecing together the relationships among some of these individuals based
on the genetic findings enabled the researchers to conclude that these
Neanderthal communities were comprised of a small group of close
relatives, consisting of perhaps 10 to 20 members, and that it was the
women who migrated among communities, with the men staying put.
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The caves are located at the easternmost extent of the known
geographical range of Neanderthals, who inhabited parts of western
Eurasia while another now-extinct human lineage called the Denisovans
occupied parts of eastern Eurasia.
The caves are located within 60 miles (100 km) of the site where the
first remains of Denisovans were found, but the study detected no
evidence of interbreeding between these 13 Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Our species had not yet reached this region at the time.
While genomic analyses of Neanderthals have previously provided insights
into their population history and close relationship to our species,
their social organization has been harder to reconstruct.
"I think our insights make Neanderthals more relatable, and in some
sense more human. They were people that lived and died in small family
groups, likely in a harsh environment. Yet they managed to persevere for
hundreds of thousands of years," said population geneticist Benjamin
Peter of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in
Leipzig, Germany, a co-author of the research published in the journal
Nature.
Neanderthals, more robustly built than Homo sapiens and with larger
brows, lived from around 430,000 years ago to roughly 40,000 years ago.
The 13 Neanderthal individuals included five children and adolescents.
There were seven males and six females.
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![](../images/102022PIX/news_f7.jpg)
A reconstruction of a Neanderthal father
and his daughter is seen in this undated handout photo provided by
the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig,
Germany. Tom Bjorklund/Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology/Handout via REUTERS
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2022/Oct/20/images/ads/current/longviewbank_sda_FHI_2022.png)
The Chagyrskaya cave site yielded remains of an adult male father
and his teenage daughter, thought to have been in late adolescence.
There also was a boy between 8 and 12 years old, based on dental
evidence, along with an adult female relative who the genetic
findings suggested was an aunt, cousin or grandmother.
Scientists found numerous stone tools and animal bones in the two
caves, suggestive of small hunter-gatherer communities whose members
hunted bison, ibex, horses and other animals that migrated through
the river valleys situated below these caves.
Far from the obsolete stereotype of dimwitted brutes, studies have
shown that Neanderthals were intelligent, creating art, using
complex group hunting methods, pigments probably for body painting,
symbolic objects and perhaps spoken language.
The low genetic diversity - similar to endangered species bordering
on extinction - found among the 13 Neanderthals in the research
provided evidence for the small group sizes of these communities.
The researchers compared the genetic diversity on the Y-chromosome -
the one inherited father-to-son - to mitochondrial DNA diversity -
inherited from mothers. The higher mitochondrial genetic diversity
indicated that these communities were primarily linked by movement
of the females from one to another.
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The nature of the interaction between our species and Neanderthals -
formally called Homo neanderthalensis - remains hazy. There was
interbreeding, as shown by the fact that modern non-African human
populations bear residual Neanderthal DNA. But our role in their
extinction remains unclear. Neanderthals disappeared relatively soon
after our species moved into their territory, as was also the case
with Denisovans.
(Reporting by Will Dunham, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien)
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