Genetic study reveals outline of Neanderthal social organization

50,000 years ago in a Siberian cave lived a Neanderthal family whose women moved more than men: a genetic study released today outlines the “social organization” of its distant, now-extinct cousins human.

The Neanderthal Genome Sequencing by the Swede Svante Paaborecently awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, allowed to trace the history of these hominids that inhabited western Eurasia 430,000-40,000 years ago.

Thanks to archaeological research we now know that some Neanderthals buried their dead, made tools and even ornaments – nothing to do with the image of unsophisticated primitives that accompanied them for years. But we know little about the social structure of their groups. The genetic sequencing of an entire group, the largest ever done on these hominids, provides a small picture.

The story takes place in southern Siberia, in Russia, in an area very fertile for ancient DNA research, since the cold helps preserve fragile and precious traces of the distant past. There, in the cave of the same name, the genome of the Denisovan man, another species of extinct anthropoid, was discovered, as the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig recalls, whose work is published in the scientific journal Nature.

At a distance of 100 kilometers from there are the Sagirskaya and Okladnikov caves, where Neanderthals lived about 54,000 years ago. Many remains had already been found there, in a single layer of deposition, which suggested that the “occupants” of the caves lived around the same time.

Father and daughter, aunt and nephew

For scientists to verify this, the DNA had to “speak”, an extremely delicate task since there were no whole skeletons but only some teeth and scattered bone fragments.

“Initially, we had to establish how many individuals there were,” paleogeneticist Stéphane Peyren, one of the study’s lead authors, told AFP. His team used new techniques to isolate and “capture” ancient, human DNA, which is often contaminated by microbes.

Verdict: the remains belonged to 13 Neanderthals, 7 males and 6 females. Of these, 5 were children and teenagers. The 11 were all found in the Sagirskaya cave. In mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from the mother, the researchers found the same genetic variation.

The genes also revealed their close family ties: a father and his teenage daughter, a young boy and a grown woman who may have been his cousin, aunt or grandmother. Evidence that these people belonged to the same family and lived at the same time.

Thanks to genetics “we are building a concrete picture of what a Neanderthal community might have been like. They seem much more human to me,” commented Benjamin Peter, who oversaw the research alongside Svante Paabo.

The group in question, genetically belonging to the Neanderthals of Western Europe, had not mixed with other species – Homo sapiens or Denisovans – as other Neanderthal groups had at other times.

A patriarchal society

The genetic diversity of the members of the group was thin, an indication of their close blood relationship and the fact that they lived in small groups of 10-20 individuals – significantly smaller than those of Homo sapiens.

According to Stéphane Peyren, the groups were not completely isolated from each other. Characteristically, women tended to move from community to community to reproduce while men stayed in their original tribe. This “patrilocal” function of the group, which was also true in Sapiens, is indicated by the lower genetic diversity of Y chromosomes, which are passed from father to child, as opposed to mitochondrial DNA that comes exclusively from the mother.

Paleoanthropologist Antoine Balzo, who was not involved in this study, recalled that this kind of social organization had also been found from the research of fossils in the cave of El Sidron in Spain, but the genetic material in that case was not as complete.

RES-EMP

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