Posted on 10/20/2022 9:01:59 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
...He and his colleagues managed to extract DNA from 15 out of 17 pieces of bone or teeth recovered from the Chagyrskaya cave in the Altai mountains in Siberia, Russia. The DNA showed that some pieces came from the same individuals, so the findings represent 11 individuals in total, including several teenagers and children.
Dating of sediments and bison bones at the site suggests the Neanderthals lived in the cave between 51,000 and 59,000 years ago, while the DNA shows that many of the individuals were related...
Peter thinks it is possible that these individuals all died around the same time, but the team doesn’t know how. There are no signs of burial, he says...
...the team can’t say whether this high level of inbreeding affected the health of these individuals. It may be a result of being an isolated group on the edge of the range of Neanderthals, rather than being true of Neanderthals generally...
The researchers also compared the diversity of Y chromosomes, inherited from the father, with that of mitochondrial DNA, inherited from the mother. They found an order of magnitude more mitochondrial diversity, says Peter...
Female-based migration is the predominant pattern in modern hunter-gatherers, says Stringer, and there is some evidence for it among Neanderthals from the El Sidron site in northern Spain...
Peter and his colleagues also tried extracting DNA from 10 specimens from the nearby Okladnikov cave, but only got DNA from two individuals. These weren’t related to each other or to the Chagyrskaya group.
The research team included Svante Pääbo, who won the 2022 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for his discoveries concerning human evolution and the genomes of our extinct human relatives.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
:^) Sounds like a solid typical American heritage. :^)
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