“It makes them alive in a way and allows me to think about them in a much more complex way”
![Chagyrskaya Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia was once a hunting camp for Neanderthals. DNA evidence from a dozen individuals, including a father and daughter, shed light on their social behaviors.](https://oponame.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Neanderthal-men-stayed-close-to-home-while-women-migrated-to.jpg)
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While inspecting the tooth discovered in a cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia, Bence Viola, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto, pondered what conclusions he could draw from it.
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It was a “baby tooth,” he said in an interview, a barely worn premolar from a girl that would have fallen out naturally, so that person isn’t necessarily dead here, not like the man whose vertebra and ulna were also found nearby in the same cave.
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In all, he and his colleagues found DNA evidence, in bone and tooth fragments, of more than a dozen individuals.
Research published Wednesday shows that the girl with the tooth and the man with the spine were so closely related that they were either parent and child or siblings, but also that they had different mitochondrial DNA, which comes from the mother, so they were probably father and daughter.
This is the first time that such a close family relationship has been demonstrated over such a vast time scale, over 50,000 years.
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Genetic evidence from other Neanderthals has also shown that males were genetically closer than females. Two other males, for example, were close maternal cousins to the father, possibly sharing a grandmother.
The research team concludes that young Neanderthal women, not young men, tended to migrate between different social groups, each numbering perhaps two dozen individuals.
![A photo of one of the teeth that was analyzed after it was discovered in 2018.](https://oponame.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Neanderthal-men-stayed-close-to-home-while-women-migrated-to.jpeg)
The 13 Neanderthal individuals whose DNA the team studied makes this by far the largest study ever of a Neanderthal population, Viola said. The paper published Wednesday in Nature is co-authored with his colleague Svante Pääbo, who just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for related discoveries on the genomes of extinct hominins, particularly Neanderthals, and human evolution. .
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The lead author of the paper is Laurits Skov, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
It’s not really surprising that people who lived and died in close proximity to each other are related. But that knowledge works magic in the mind of an anthropologist, Viola said.
“It makes them a lot more human, to actually be able to show it,” Viola said. “It makes them alive in a way and allows me to think about them in a much more complex way.”
Once you demonstrate that this Neanderthal teenage girl lost a tooth at a short-term hunting camp, where she spent time with her father and their small group, slaughtering the ibexes they hunted in the hills or herds of bison passing through a narrow valley. below, then these people come to life, Viola says, and “almost have faces, which is awesome to me.”
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![The excavation site.](https://oponame.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/1666206705_154_Neanderthal-men-stayed-close-to-home-while-women-migrated-to.jpeg)
Neanderthals are man’s closest extinct relatives and are of particular interest for the study of human origins because they are very similar to us, from genetics to relatively large brains.
“If you dress a Neanderthal in modern clothes and put him on the subway, you might think he’s a bit ugly, but you’d recognize him like us,” Viola said.
On the other hand, they’re also widely regarded as humanity’s brutal caveman cousin, which we obviously compare ourselves better against, considering those who are still alive by the billions and have since been extinct 40,000 years old. Since their discovery 200 years ago, Neanderthals have reassured humans of their evolutionary uniqueness.
Over the past 20 years, however, thanks in part to Pääbo’s genomic research, Neanderthals’ reputation has improved.
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Viola points out that people used to think that Neanderthals didn’t have symbolic behaviors like art, music, or language. This turns out to be completely wrong, as the ornaments and painting show.
If you dress a Neanderthal in modern clothes and put him on the subway, you might think he’s a bit ugly, but you’d recognize him like us.
How they behaved socially is an ongoing mystery, although evidence suggests it was structured, with patterns similar to contemporary Homo sapiens, and variations partly driven by innovations in tools and strategies of survival.
This most recent search looked at the genomes of 13 Neanderthals, primarily from Chagyrskaya Cave, dated to over 50,000 years ago, and two from the slightly younger Okladnikov Cave, both locations thought to be camps of short-term hunting. These sites, in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia, are as far east as Neanderthals are known to have lived. Viola’s general impression of their lives is that they have always been on the brink of extinction.
However, Neanderthal populations in Europe may have been different, Viola said, as evidence from a major Neanderthal site, Vindija Cave in Croatia, suggests.
“Our findings raise questions about whether the characteristics of Altai communities are related to their isolated geographic location at the easternmost end of the known Neanderthal range…or whether they are characteristic of Neanderthal communities more broadly,” the document states.
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