Scientists believe that they might have found the original Flintstones after conducting the largest genetic study of Neanderthals. In an unprecedented discovery, they found the first Neanderthal family who lived in a Siberian cave around 54,000 years ago.
Researchers report in their new study titled "Genetic Insights Into the Social Organization of Neanderthals" published in Nature that they used DNA sequencing to look at the social life of a Neanderthal community and found that women are more likely to stray from the cave than men. The study sheds light on the Neanderthal family structure and community organization.
Neanderthals Did Not Interbred With Relatives
Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo recently won the medicine Nobel prize for his work on sequencing the first Neanderthal genome in 2010, which offered a new way to discover more about the ancient species.
From this knowledge, a team focused on multiple Neanderthal remains found in the Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov caves in southern Siberia. France24 reports that the team studied fragments of bones mostly in a single layer and then identified how many individuals own those bones.
They used new techniques to extract and isolate ancient DNA from the bones and they established 13 Neanderthals, seven males, and six females. Five of them are children or early adolescents.
Out of 13 individuals, 11 were from the Chagyrskaya cave in which many of them are from the same family including the father and his teenage daughter, and a young boy and a woman who is a second-degree relative.
The team worked out that one man was the maternal relative of the father based on the genetic phenomenon known as heteroplasmy, which is only passed down a couple of generations. Benjamin Peter from Max Planck who also supervised the research with Paabo said that the study provides a concrete picture of what a Neanderthal community looks like, making them more human.
More so, they did not interbreed with nearby relatives like humans and Denisovans, who are hominins also discovered by Paabo a few kilometers away from the Neanderthals. But it is now well-known that Neanderthals did breed with Homo sapiens at some point that gave many humans now a little Neanderthal DNA.
Women Wander While Men Stay at Home
According to CNN, the team also found that heteroplasmy was shared between individual Neanderthals, phenomena that suggested those from Chagyrskaya Cavemust have lived and died around the same time.
They were able to unravel multiple threads of genetic diversity of the Y chromosome in the DNA and found that it was a lot lower than that of the mitochondrial DNA passed from mothers. The study calculated that two males could share an ancestor around 450 years before they lived compared to females who shared ancestors around 4,350 before they were born.
The best explanation they offered was that more than 60% of female Neanderthals in the small Chagyrskaya group traveled to other communities while men stayed at home. The Neanderthal community under study showed extremely low genetic diversity than any recorded ancient or present human community.
Chris Stringer, research leader in human evolution at Natural History Museum who was not involved in the research, said that the lack of genetic diversity was not a factor in the extinction of Neanderthals who disappeared 40,000 years ago.
Researchers also noted that what they have discovered might not be representative of the social lives of the whole Neanderthal population. Therefore, more research is needed that includes genetic sequencing of more Neanderthals.
RELATED ARTICLE : Neanderthal Genomes of Father, Daughter and 12 Other Relatives Reveal Diverse Family Groups
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