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Initial Upper Palaeolithic humans in Europe had recent Neanderthal ancestry

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posted on 2021-04-14, 08:13 authored by Mateja Hajdinjak, Fabrizio Mafessoni, Laurits Skov, Benjamin Vernot, Alexander Hübner, Qiaomei Fu, Elena Essel, Sarah Nagel, Birgit Nickel, Julia Richter, Oana Teodora Moldovan, Silviu Constantin, Elena Endarova, Nikolay Zahariev, Rosen Spasov, Frido Welker, Geoff M Smith, Virginie Sinet-Mathiot, Lindsey Paskulin, Helen Fewlass, Sahra Talamo, Zeljko Rezek, Svoboda Sirakova, Nikolay Sirakov, Shannon P McPherron, Tsenka Tsanova, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Benjamin M Peter, Matthias Meyer, Pontus Skoglund, Janet Kelso, Svante Pääbo
Modern humans appeared in Europe by at least 45,000 years ago1,2,3,4,5, but the extent of their interactions with Neanderthals, who disappeared by about 40,000 years ago6, and their relationship to the broader expansion of modern humans outside Africa are poorly understood. Here we present genome-wide data from three individuals dated to between 45,930 and 42,580 years ago from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria1,2. They are the earliest Late Pleistocene modern humans known to have been recovered in Europe so far, and were found in association with an Initial Upper Palaeolithic artefact assemblage. Unlike two previously studied individuals of similar ages from Romania7 and Siberia8 who did not contribute detectably to later populations, these individuals are more closely related to present-day and ancient populations in East Asia and the Americas than to later west Eurasian populations. This indicates that they belonged to a modern human migration into Europe that was not previously known from the genetic record, and provides evidence that there was at least some continuity between the earliest modern humans in Europe and later people in Eurasia. Moreover, we find that all three individuals had Neanderthal ancestors a few generations back in their family history, confirming that the first European modern humans mixed with Neanderthals and suggesting that such mixing could have been common.

Funding

Crick (Grant ID: 10595, Grant title: Skoglund FC001595) Wellcome Trust (Grant ID: 217223/Z/19/Z, Grant title: WT 217223/Z/19/Z) European Research Council (Grant ID: 852558, Grant title: ERC 852558 - AGRICON) European Commission (Grant ID: 844014 - ORIGIN, Grant title: EC 844014 - ORIGIN)

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