The DNA of a father with his daughter and of a boy with an adult woman, perhaps his cousin, 54,000 years ago, is sequenced from the Pbo Nobel group. Mystery about the causes of their death. Scientist Sahra Talamo in the Nobel Paabo team: The woman played a central role
Behind great scientific news lies a mystery. First the news: a group of researchers, led by the recent Nobel prize for medicine Svante Pbo, and of which she is the only Italian Sahra Talamo of the University of Bolognasequenced and dated for the first time the genome of an entire group of Neanderthalnot just of a single person as has always been the case so far.
The remains and the dating
These are 17 remains found in two caves located in the Altai mountainsin Siberia. Talamo, director of the Bravho radiocarbon laboratory (Bologna Radiocarbon Laboratory Devoted to Human Evolution), established that they were individuals who lived more than 50,000 years ago. With further DNA analysis has come to identify a date around 54 thousand years ago. The thirteen remains of the Chagyrskaya cave belonged to seven Neanderthal men and six women, consisting of eight adults and five children and adolescents. All close relatives. In particular, a father and his daughter have been identified, and a couple consisting of a boy and an adult woman, perhaps the cousin or an aunt, or perhaps the grandmother.
The mystery
All of them lived together in the same period. At this point here is the mystery: Since their bones were found in the same cave, it can be assumed that they all died together. If not at the same time, at least within a short time distance from each other. Yes, but how? We can only put forward hypotheses, says the professor of the Chemistry department of the University of Bologna. A disease that exterminated them, or a sudden disaster like an eruption, a flood that blocked the cave, perhaps the collapse of the entrance that blocked them inside and prevented their exit. We will probably never know. For their remains, however, they tell a lot about the social organization of Neanderthals, a subject we knew very little about until now.
Low genetic variability
These individuals lived around the same time and likely came from the same social community, Laurits Skov, of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology and first signer of the paper published in Nature. surprising and exciting. Their genetic variability was very low and suggests that they were a group of no more than 10-20 individuals, similar in size to groups of endangered species. But it was not an isolated community. In fact, in the second cave, that of Okladnikov, not very far away but not even adjacent, the other four remains showed a connection of the mitochondrial DNA (inherited from the mothers), therefore occurred through female migration.
The movements of women
These data must make us reflect on the role that women have always had since the beginning of our evolutionary history, added Talamo. In practice it was the women who moved from one community to another. More or less like women who, after marriage, leave the family of origin and enter the family to which their husband belongs. The groups of the two caves hunted ibex, horses, bison and other migrating animals and even collected the stones they worked tens of kilometers away. Perhaps thanks to these movements they had come into contact and became related.
Differences and similarities
The caves studied are located in the same area of the Altai mountains where a new human species was identified a few years ago, the Denisovans, who lived in the same period as the Neanderthals and us Sapiens, specifies Sahra Thalamus. For the remains we have studied they show no sign of mixing with the Denisovians. Furthermore, the Neanderthals of our two caves, genetically and in the stone tools they used, were much more similar to the European Neanderthals than to those who previously lived in Siberia and who, they did, mingled with the Denisovans.
October 19, 2022 (change October 19, 2022 | 17:35)
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