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Genetic sequencing of human remains dating back 45,000 years has revealed previously unknown migration in Europe and has shown that mixing with Neanderthals during this period was more common than previously thought.
The research is based on the analysis of several ancient human remains – including an entire tooth and bone fragments – found in a cave in Bulgaria last year.
Genetic sequencing revealed that the remains came from individuals who were more closely related to current populations in East Asia and the Americas than to populations in Europe.
“This indicates that they belonged to a modern human migration to Europe that was not previously known by the genetic record,” said the research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
It “also provides evidence that there was at least some continuity between early modern humans in Europe and later people in Eurasia,” the study added.
The results “changed our previous understanding of early human migrations in Europe,” said Mateja Hajdinjak, an associate researcher at the German Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who helped lead the research.
“It showed how even the very first history of modern Europeans in Europe could have been tumultuous and involved population replacements,” she told AFP.
One possibility raised by the results is “a dispersal of human groups which are then replaced [by other groups] later in Western Eurasia, but continue to live and contribute to the ancestry of the people of Eastern Eurasia, ”she added.
The remains were discovered last year in the Bacho Kiro cave in Bulgaria and were hailed at the time as evidence that humans lived alongside Neanderthals in Europe much earlier than previously thought.
Genetic analysis of the remains also revealed that modern humans in Europe at this time mixed more with Neanderthals than previously thought.
All individuals in the Bacho Kiro caves have Neanderthal ancestors five to seven generations before life, suggesting that the mixture [mixing] between these early humans in Europe and the Neanderthals was common, ”Hajdinjak said.
Earlier evidence of early human-Neanderthal mixing in Europe came from a single individual called Oase 1, dating back 40,000 years and found in Romania.
“Until now, we couldn’t rule out that this was a chance discovery,” Hajdinjak said.
The results were accompanied by separate research published Wednesday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution involving the genome sequencing of samples from a skull found in the Czech Republic.
The skull was found in the Zlaty kun area in 1950, but its age has been the subject of debate and conflicting findings in the decades since.
Initial analysis suggested he was over 30,000 years old, but radiocarbon dating gave an age closer to 15,000 years.
Genetic analysis now appears to have solved the problem, suggesting an age of at least 45,000 years, said Kay Prufer of the Max Planck Institute’s department of archeogenetics, who led the research.
“We use the fact that all those who trace their ancestry to individuals who left Africa more than 50,000 years ago have some Neanderthal ancestry in their genomes,” he told AFP. .
These traces of Neanderthals appear in short blocks in modern human genomes, and increasingly longer later in human history.
“In older people, like the 45,000-year-old Ust’-Ishim man from Siberia, these blocks are much longer,” Prufer said.
“We find that the genome of the female Zlaty kun has blocks even longer than those of the male Ust’-Ishim. This makes us confident that she lived at the same time, if not earlier.
Although it dates from roughly the same period as Bacho Kiro’s remains, Zlaty kun’s skull does not share genetic links with modern Asian or European populations.
Prufer now hopes to study how the populations that produced the two sets of remains were related.
“We don’t know who were the first Europeans who ventured into an unknown land,” he said.
“By analyzing their genomes, we discover a part of our own history that has been lost in time.”
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