The discovery tells about the social structure of Neanderthal society.
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology managed to to find the remains of an entire Neanderthal family: a father, his teenage daughter, and their distant relatives. In the distant past, they lived in the Chagir Cave in Altai, Nature reports.
It is noted that a family and seven other individuals were found in one cave, two of whom could be cousins from another clan. The findings suggest that Neanderthal communities were small and women usually left their families to join new groups.
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Chagyr Cave is located 100 kilometers from Denisova, in which Neanderthals, Denisovans and at least one of their hybrids lived intermittently for 300,000 years. But so far, only the remains of Neanderthals, whose age is estimated at 50-60 thousand years, as well as characteristic stone tools, have been found in Chagyr Cave.
In 2020, scientists sequenced the genome of a Neanderthal woman from Chagyr Cave and found out that she belonged to a population that was different from those that inhabited Denisova Cave. In the course of a new study, scientists analyzed the DNA of 17 inhabitants of the Chagyr Cave, as well as several inhabitants of the nearby Okhladinkov Cave.
Teeth and bones were found in the Chagyr Cave, thanks to which the scientists were able to study the material of 11 individuals. The remains from the Okhladinkov cave were poorly preserved, only two had enough material for DNA extraction and sequencing.
The analysis showed that the Neanderthals from the Chagir Cave were more related to the Europeans than to those who lived in the Denisova Cave.
The results of further analysis came as a surprise to scientists: the DNA of an adult Neanderthal and a teenage girl matched half . This could happen if they were brother and sister or father and daughter.
To determine the degree of relatedness, the researchers looked at mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited through the maternal line and will therefore be identical in siblings and in mother and child, but not in father and child. It was different in the man and the girl, which indicates that they were father and daughter.
Continuing the analysis of genetic material, scientists found more relatives. Yes, the father had two types of mitochondrial DNA – a feature known as heteroplasmy – that were shared by the other two adult cave men. This indicates that they came from the same maternal line. Heteroplasmy usually disappears after several generations, so all three likely lived around the same time.
The researchers also identified another family: a man and a woman who were likely cousins.< /p>
Scientists noted that the studied genomes of Neanderthals differed little on the maternal and paternal lines. This indicates that they lived in small groups. Something similar is observed in mountain gorillas, which live in groups of 20 individuals, and some other species.
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The analysis also noted that women from one community moved to live in another.
