The Vindija cave in Croatia where some of the Neanderthal remains were discovered.M. HAJDINJAKThe genomes of five Neanderthals who lived roughly 39,000 to 47,000 years ago are offering researchers insight into the life history of the ancient hominins. New findings, published yesterday (March 21) in Nature, suggest that those individuals split from an older Neanderthal ancestor from Siberia approximately 150,000 years ago, and that the species experienced was a major population turnover around the end of its history.
Mateja Hajdinjak, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and her colleagues sequenced the genomes of the five Neanderthals from bones and teeth found in Belgium, France, Croatia, and the Russian Caucasus. Previously, only four Neanderthal genomes had been sequenced—the new analysis brings the total to nine.
Comparing the new sequences to the genome of another Neanderthal from the Caucasus region revealed that, in addition to splitting from a common ancestor around 150,000 years ago, Neanderthals experienced a major population turnover toward the end of their history, approximately 38,000 years ago. The researchers suggest that this could have been due to extreme cold periods, which led to the extinction of local populations and then recolonization from southern Europe or ...
