Ancient DNA from closely related individuals offers fresh insight into Neanderthals’ lives and social structures.
. Excavations of Chagyrskaya, however, have so far revealed only Neanderthal remains, dated to between 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, and characteristic stone tools.
With this trove, the researchers confirmed that Chagyrskaya’s residents were more closely related to Neanderthals living in Europe around the same time than to those who occupied Denisova Cave tens of thousands of years earlier. The researchers found more family members as they continued to examine the genetic material. They found that the father had two types of mitochondrial DNA — a characteristic known as heteroplasmy — that were shared by two other adult males from the cave, suggesting that they were all from the same maternal lineage. Heteroplasmies usually vanish after a few generations, says Skov, so the three probably lived around the same time.
“I think we can say this social structure was present in most Neanderthals,” says palaeogeneticist Carles Lalueza-Fox, director of the Natural Sciences Museum of Barcelona, Spain. A decade ago, his team analysed 12 Neanderthals buried in a Spanish cave and found diverse mitochondrial DNA in women, but not in men, which they interpreted as evidence that females had left their communities
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