Go East old man: Neanderthals reached China's doorstep

PARIS (AFP) — European Neanderthals, modern man's ill-fated cousins who died out mysteriously some 28,000 years ago, migrated much further east than previously thought, according to a study released Sunday.

Remains from the slope-browed hominid have previously been found over an area stretching from Spain to Uzbekistan, but the new study extends the eastern boundary of their wanderings another 2,000 kilometres (1,250 miles) deep into southern Siberia, just above the western tip of what is today China.

The fossils underpinning the study are not new, but the techniques used to analyse them are.

Geneticist Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and colleagues compared mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from bones found from two sites -- one in Teshik Tash, Uzbekistan and the other from the Altai Mountains in Siberia -- with those of specimens from different European sites.

Scientists looking at the morphology of the remains from the central Asian sites have long disagreed as to whether they came from Neanderthals or Homo sapiens sapiens, the species name for modern man.

The study, published in the British journal Nature, confirms that the adult fossils -- about 40,000 years old -- from Okladnikov Cave in Siberia genetically match the European Neanderthal.

"The fact that no deep mtDNA divergence is seen ... shows that they were not separated for a long time," supporting a theory that Neanderthals colonised most of the Russian plains during a warming period some 125,000 years ago, the researchers conclude.

Every human cell contains thousands of mitochondria, tiny structures that convert the energy from food into a form that cells can use. Although most DNA is packaged in chromosomes within the nucleus, mitochondria also have a small amount of their own.

Mitochondrial DNA is more abundant than nuclear DNA, and is thus more likely to be recovered.

In addition, mtDNA is transmitted only from the mother so that changes from generation to generation result from mutation alone rather than recombination of the mother and father's DNA.

The presence of Neanderthals in Siberia "raises the possibility that they man have been present even farther to the east, in Mongolia and China," the study notes.

Smaller and squatter than modern man, Neanderthals lived in parts of what are today Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East for around 170,000 years.

Sometime between 28,000 and 30,000 years ago, these poorly understood hominids disappeared, a vanishing act that has sparked fierce debate among palaeontologists.

Some say that the Neanderthals were wiped out by a sudden cold snap. More recent research, however, points to another culprit: us.

Even here, there are broadly two lines of thought. One is that Neanderthals, vying for food and habitat, were slaughtered by modern humans armed with superior stone tools and weapons.

Another is that the two species intermingled and interbred, with the weaker, less numerous Neanderthals simply petering out as a distinct group.

GGG Ping.

Also, here’s this, from Nature:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nature06193.html

Neanderthals in central Asia and Siberia
Johannes Krause1, Ludovic Orlando2, David Serre3, Bence Viola4, Kay Prüfer1, Michael P. Richards1, Jean-Jacques Hublin1, Catherine Hänni2, Anatoly P. Derevianko5 & Svante Pääbo1

Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany
Paléogénétique et Évolution Moléculaire, Institut de Génomique Fonctionnelle de Lyon, Université de Lyon, Institut Fédératif Biosciences Gerland Lyon Sud, Université Lyon 1, CNRS, INRA, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, 46 Allée d’Italie, 69364 Lyon, Cedex 07, France
McGill University and Genome Quebec Innovation Center, Montreal, Quebec H3A 1A4, Canada
Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna, Althanstrasse 14, 1090 Vienna, Austria
Paleolithic Department, Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Siberian Branch. Lavrentieva Prospekt, 17 Novosibirsk, 630090 Russia
Correspondence to: Svante Pääbo1 Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to S.P. (Email: paabo@eva.mpg.de).

Top of pageMorphological traits typical of Neanderthals began to appear in European hominids at least 400,000 years ago1 and about 150,000 years ago2 in western Asia. After their initial appearance, such traits increased in frequency and the extent to which they are expressed until they disappeared shortly after 30,000 years ago. However, because most fossil hominid remains are fragmentary, it can be difficult or impossible to determine unambiguously whether a fossil is of Neanderthal origin. This limits the ability to determine when and where Neanderthals lived. To determine how far to the east Neanderthals ranged, we determined mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from hominid remains found in Uzbekistan and in the Altai region of southern Siberia. Here we show that the DNA sequences from these fossils fall within the European Neanderthal mtDNA variation. Thus, the geographic range of Neanderthals is likely to have extended at least 2,000 km further to the east than commonly assumed.

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