BAFFLED scientists have unearthed the world’s oldest human DNA in Europe – with a key part of our history and family tree unlocked.
In a cave under a medieval castle, 13 bone fragments were unearthed that belonged to six individuals including a mum and a daughter, as well as distant cousins.
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The fragments were discovered in Ranis, Germany, with the people they belonged to believed to have walked the earth around 45,000 years ago, according to a study.
The ancient genomes sequenced from the bone fragments carried breakthrough evidence of Neanderthal ancestry.
Researchers determined that the ancestors of the early humans who lived in and around the area are likely to have encountered and had babies with Neanderthals around 80 generations prior.
This equates to 1,500 years earlier, but the interaction didn’t necessarily happen in the same location.
Experts have known since the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced in 2010 that early humans interbred with Neanderthals.
This was seen as a bombshell breakthrough in knowledge, as it laid the foundations in the understanding of a genetic legacy that is still traceable in humans today.
But it’s unclear when, how often, and where the unbelievable juncture in human history actually took place.
And the individuals in the cave in Ranis were among the first Homo sapiens to live in Europe.
One woman – who lived 143 miles away in Zlatý kůň in the Czech Republicic – was also an early European and connected to the Ranis people.
DNA from her skull was sequenced in a previous study which led to the unbelievable crossover.
Scientists have suggested that the inter-species relations would have happened somewhere in the Middle East.
This is because a large amount of Homo sapiens left Africa and crossed paths with Neanderthals who had lived across Eurasia for a whopping 250,000 years.
Now a bigger study on Neanderthal ancestry analyses information from the genomes of 59 ancient humans with 275 living humans for a more precise timeline.
It found that the majority of Neanderthal ancestry in modern humans can be attributed to a “single, shared extended period of gene flow”.
The research managed to point out a very important period that started around 50,500 years ago and ended around 43,500 years ago.
This is not long before the Neanderthals began to disappear from the archaeological record.
Over this 7,000-year period, early humans and Neanderthals had sex and gave birth to children fairly regularly.
The study suggests that the height of activity was around 47,000 years ago.
It also showed how certain genetic variants inherited from our Neanderthal ancestors varied over time.
They also make up between 1 per cent and 3 per cent of our genomes today.
Some inherited variants from our Neanderthal ancestors, like those relating to the immune system, proved to be beneficial to humans as they lived through the last ice age when temperatures were cooler.
Who were the Neanderthals? Our mysterious extinct cousins explained
Here’s what you need to know…
- The Neanderthals were a mysterious human ancestor who died out around 40,000 years ago.
- Thousands of their tools, weapons and other artefacts have been found, as well as several nearly complete skeletons.
- Neanderthals were the original ‘cave men’, thought for decades to be brutish and dim-witted compared to humans.
- However, a growing body of evidence suggests we’ve been selling Neanderthals short.
- Their brains were bigger than ours and they indulged in cultural activities like cave painting and body art.
- Our heavy-browed cousins even had funerary rituals, meaning they buried their dead with an afterlife in mind.
- Having lived in Africa for many millennia, Neanderthals began to move across to Europe around 400,000 years ago.
- Early humans followed suit far later, arriving just 60,000 years ago.
- Neanderthals mysteriously died out shortly afterwards, possibly due to a disease pandemic or hunting by humans.
- It’s also thought our ancestors outcompeted their newfound rivals for food and shelter, eventually wiping them from the planet.
An author on the Science study said: “We were far more similar than we were different.
“The differences that we imagined between these groups to be very big, actually, were very small, genetically speaking.
“They seem to have mixed with each other for a long period of time and were living side by side for a long period of time.”
The Neanderthal gene variants that are detected most often in ancient and modern Homo sapiens genomes relate to specific traits and functions.
These include immune function, skin pigmentation and metabolism – and some have increased in frequency over time.
The new timeline scientists have uncovered allows them to better understand when humans left Africa and migrated globally.
But it is still not clear as to why people in East Asia have more Neanderthal ancestry than Europeans, or why Neanderthal genomes from the specific period show little proof of Homo sapiens DNA.
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