Meet The First Neanderthal Family: DNA Enables A 2022 Nobel Prize Winner To Trace Our Ancestors’ Family Tree

For the first time, researchers have sequenced many members of a distant Neandertal village in Siberia, including thirteen individuals who are all somehow connected. One pair of closely connected ancestors, a father, and his teenage daughter, lived with a smaller family of ten to twenty individuals.

Our ancestors are the neanderthals, from which modern humans descended. Around 400,000 to 40,000 years ago, they inhabited Europe, southwest Asia, and Central Asia. Svante Paabo, who won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine for research on human evolution that revealed Neanderthal DNA’s secrets, is the principal investigator of the current study.

The thirteen genomes allowed the worldwide team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology to get insight into the Neanderthal community’s social structure. This is the first time that Neanderthals are being evaluated on a personal level, despite the fact that researchers had previously been successful in illuminating the broad strokes of Neanderthal history.

The genetic information from the microscopic bone fragments discovered in two Russian caves was used to establish the relationships between 13 different Neanderthals and to gain insight into how they lived. The magazine Nature has published the specifics of their discoveries.

About 54,000 years ago, a Neanderthal family lived in these caverns, and during the past 14 years, their remains have been discovered there. In the river valleys that the caves overlook, ibex, horses, bison, and other animals that were migrating at the time were hunted by the Neandertals at Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov, according to researchers.

In the caves, archaeologists have uncovered the bones of at least a dozen individual Neanderthals. A few cousins of the group might be located by researchers. There were also two other family members present, either a kid and his aunt or a couple of cousins, in addition to the father and daughter.

Researchers also discovered that female migration played a major role in connecting the Neandertal tribes. They proved this by contrasting the genetic diversity of the mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited from mothers, with the genetic diversity of the Y-chromosome, which is passed down from father to son.

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