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Scientists have for the first time discovered the remains of a close-knit Neanderthal clan, including a family, a father and his daughter, in a Russian cave, offering a rare window into antiquity.
The clan was discovered in one of the largest genetic studies of a Neanderthal population to date, published this week in the journal Nature. Scientists suspect that they died together about 54,000 years ago, perhaps tragically, from starvation or a great storm, in the mountains of southern Siberia. They lived on top of a rocky cliff at the outer limits of the known range of Neanderthals, which stretched from the Atlantic regions of Europe to central Asia.
The social organization of Neanderthal populations is not well understood. Recent research suggests that at least in Siberia, Neanderthals lived in groups of 10 to 20 people, similar to today’s mountain gorillas, which are an endangered species.
The study was carried out by a global team of scientists, including Svante Paabo, a Swedish geneticist who this month won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work mapping our genetic links to Neanderthals.
Nobel Prize to the Swedish scientist who deciphered the Neanderthal genome
Unlike many archaeological sites, which contain fossils built over long periods, genetic studies of 11 Neanderthals found in Chagyrskaya Cave in the Altai Mountains near the Russian border with Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China showed that many of them were close relatives, which suggests. they all lived at the same time.
“Chagyrskaya Cave is basically a moment in time 54,000 years ago when this community lived and died in this cave,” said Richard G. Roberts, a scholar at the University of Wollongong in Australia and one of the co-authors of the study an interview.
“Most archaeological sites, things build up slowly and tend to get chewed up by hyenas or something like that,” he said. “You don’t really get places that full of material. It was full of bones, Neanderthal bones, animal bones, artifacts. It’s a moment, literally frozen in time.”
The scientists used DNA taken from fossils found in Chagyrskaya Cave and two other Neanderthals found in a nearby cave to trace the relationships between the individuals and look for clues about how they lived.
Chagyrskaya Cave sits atop a hill, overlooking a floodplain where herds of bison and other animals likely grazed, Roberts said. Researchers found stone tools and bison bones buried in the cave next to the remains.
Genetic data obtained from tooth and bone fragments showed that the individuals included a father and daughter, along with a pair of second-degree relatives, possibly an aunt or uncle, niece or nephew, Roberts said. . The father’s mitochondrial DNA, a set of genes passed from mothers to their children, was also similar to two of the other males in the cave, he said, indicating they likely had a common maternal ancestor.
“They are so closely related, it’s like a clan really lives in this cave,” he said. “The idea that they could continue generation after generation seems unlikely. I think they probably all died very close together in time. Maybe it was just a horrible storm. They are in Siberia after all.”
The study also revealed that the genetic diversity of Y chromosomes (which are only passed down through the male line) was much lower than that of mitochondrial DNA in individuals, which the authors say suggests that women Neanderthals were more likely to migrate than males. This pattern is also seen in many human societies, where women marry and move away from their husband’s family before having children.
Previous work by Paabo, the Swedish geneticist, has shown that Neanderthals mixed with prehistoric humans after migrating out of Africa, and vestiges of those interactions live on in the genomes of many people today. During the pandemic, it found that a genetic risk factor associated with severe cases of covid-19 was passed down from Neanderthals, carried by about half of people in South Asia and about 1 in 6 in Europe.
The authors say the sample size of the latest study is small and may not be representative of the social life of the entire Neanderthal population.
“If we could reproduce [the study] in a couple of other places, then we would have an idea of how Neanderthals led their lives, maybe some indication of why they went extinct and we didn’t,” said Roberts, the Australian scholar. “We are very similar. So why are we the only ones left on the planet?“