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Genetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals

journal contribution
posted on 2024-11-17, 13:31 authored by Laurits Skov, Stéphane Peyrégne, Divyaratan Popli, Leonardo NM Iasi, Thibaut Devièse, Viviane Slon, Elena I Zavala, Mateja Hajdinjak, Arev P Sümer, Steffi Grote, Alba Bossoms Mesa, David López Herráez, Birgit Nickel, Sarah Nagel, Julia Richter, Elena Essel, Marie Gansauge, Anna Schmidt, Petra Korlević, Daniel Comeskey, Anatoly P Derevianko, Aliona Kharevich, Sergey V Markin, Sahra Talamo, Katerina Douka, Maciej T Krajcarz, Richard G Roberts, Thomas Higham, Bence Viola
Genomic analyses of Neanderthals have previously provided insights into their population history and relationship to modern humans1–8, but the social organization of Neanderthal communities remains poorly understood. Here we present genetic data for 13 Neanderthals from two Middle Palaeolithic sites in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia: 11 from Chagyrskaya Cave9,10 and 2 from Okladnikov Cave11—making this one of the largest genetic studies of a Neanderthal population to date. We used hybridization capture to obtain genome-wide nuclear data, as well as mitochondrial and Y-chromosome sequences. Some Chagyrskaya individuals were closely related, including a father–daughter pair and a pair of second-degree relatives, indicating that at least some of the individuals lived at the same time. Up to one-third of these individuals’ genomes had long segments of homozygosity, suggesting that the Chagyrskaya Neanderthals were part of a small community. In addition, the Y-chromosome diversity is an order of magnitude lower than the mitochondrial diversity, a pattern that we found is best explained by female migration between communities. Thus, the genetic data presented here provide a detailed documentation of the social organization of an isolated Neanderthal community at the easternmost extent of their known range.

Funding

H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (715069)

History

Journal title

Nature

Volume

610

Issue

7932

Pagination

519-525

Language

English

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