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The remains of the first known Neanderthal family have been discovered in a Siberian cave.
On Wednesday, scientists revealed that they found the fossilized bone fragments of a closely related Neanderthal clan, including a father and his teenage daughter, in astudy published inNature.
The group determined that the Neanderthals were living together on rocky clifftops more than 50,000 years ago, and likely died from starvation or during a violent storm.
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In the study, scientists provided the genetic data for 13 Neanderthals from two Middle Palaeolithic sites in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia — 11 from the Chagyrskaya Cave and two from the Okladnikov Cave.
The 13 Neanderthal individuals included five children and adolescents, with seven males and six females making up the total group.
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Scientists found that the Chagyrskaya individuals were closely related, including the father-daughter pair, and they also found a set of second-degree relatives, perhaps an aunt or an uncle and a niece or nephew.
As theThe New York Timesnotes, the father is a close relative of two other adult males at Chagyrskaya. The remains of an adult woman and a boy also contained DNA that suggested they were likely related.
The scientists believe some of the individuals likely lived at the same time, they said.
The team added that up to one-third of the genomes of the individuals studied had long segments of homozygosity, which indicates that the Chagyrskaya Neanderthals were a likely part of a small community.
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“Chagyrskaya Cave is basically a moment in time 54,000 years ago when this community lived and died in this cave,” Richard G. Roberts, a scholar at the University of Wollongong in Australia, and one of the co-authors of the study, said in an interview, perThe Washington Post.
source: people.com
