Neanderthal males stayed close to home while females migrated to mate, DNA evidence suggests

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Bence Viola, a University of Toronto paleoanthropologist, studied the tooth, which was unearthed in a cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains, and pondered what conclusions it might draw.

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It was a “milk tooth,” he said in an interview, a girl’s barely worn premolar that would have fallen out naturally, so that person didn’t necessarily die here, not like the man whose vertebrae and ulna were also found in the same nearby Cave.

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In all, he and his colleagues found DNA in bone fragments and teeth from more than a dozen people.

Research released 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 had different mitochondrial DNA derived from the mother, so they were probably father and daughter .

It is the first time such a close family relationship has been demonstrated over such a long period of more than 50,000 years.

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Genetic evidence from the other Neanderthals also showed that the males were genetically more closely related than the females. For example, two other men were close maternal cousins ​​of the father who may have shared a grandmother.

From this, the research team concludes that young Neanderthal women, not young men, were more likely to migrate between different social groups, each of which numbered perhaps two dozen individuals.

The 13 individual Neanderthals whose DNA the team examined make this by far the largest study of a Neanderthal population ever conducted, Viola said. The paper, published in Nature on Wednesday, was co-authored with his colleague Svante Pääbo, who has just won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for related discoveries about the genomes of extinct hominins, particularly Neanderthals, and human evolution.

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The lead author of the publication is Laurits Skov, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

It’s not surprising that people who lived and died close 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 when they can actually show that,” Viola said. “It brings them to life in a way and allows me to think about them in a much more complex way.”

Once you demonstrate this teenage Neanderthal girl at a short-term hunting camp where she spent time with her father and their small party, she lost a tooth to slaughter the ibex they were chasing in the hills or the bison that moved in herds through a narrow valley below, then these people come to life, said Viola, and “almost get faces, which to me is great.”

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Neanderthals are man’s closest extinct relatives and are of particular interest for research into human origins because they are so similar to us, from genetics to comparatively large brains.

“If you dress a Neanderthal in modern clothes and put him on the subway, you might think he’s a pretty ugly guy, but you would recognize him as just like us,” Viola said.

On the other hand, they are also widely viewed as humanity’s brutal cavemen, whom we obviously fare better against, considering who’s still alive in the billions and who’s been extinct for 40,000 years. Ever since they were discovered 200 years ago, Neanderthals have assured humans of their evolutionary uniqueness.

In the last 20 years, however, Neanderthal man’s reputation has improved, thanks in part to Pääbo’s genomic research.

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Viola points out that people previously thought Neanderthals did not have symbolic behaviors such as art, music, or language. This turns out to be quite 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 pretty ugly guy, but you’d recognize him as just like us

How they behaved socially is an abiding mystery, although evidence suggests it was structured, with patterns resembling those of contemporary Homo sapiens and variations caused in part by innovations in tools and survival strategies.

This latest research involved the genomes of 13 Neanderthals, mostly from Chagyrskaya Cave, which has been dated more than 50,000 years ago, and two from the slightly more recent Okladnikov Cave, both sites believed to have been short-term hunting camps. These sites in southern Siberia’s Altai Mountains are as far east as Neanderthals are known to have lived. Viola’s general sense 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 suggested by evidence from a key Neanderthal site, the Vindija Cave in Croatia.

“Our results raise the question of whether the characteristics of the 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 paper states.