Traces of Neanderthal DNA extracted from cave dust by powerful new technique reveals how European tribe living in Spanish cave was replaced by East Asians 100,000 years ago
The DNA was extracted using a new technique that allows researchers to bypass bones and fossils if there aren t any available
The caves were in the Galeria de las Estatuas cave site in Burgos, Spain and the Chagyrskaya and Denisova caves in the Altai Mountain range in Russia
More than 150 samples were analyzed
It could open up large parts of human history for genetic analysis that were not previously available
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Apr. 15, 2021 9:33 PM
A new method to extract the DNA of prehistoric hominins from the soil of caves they inhabited has revealed that Neanderthals may have bounced back from the brink of extinction at least twice before their final disappearance some 40,000 years ago.
In a study published Thursday in Science, an international team of researchers details how they recovered fragments of Neanderthal genetic material dated to between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago from cave sediments in Spain and Russia.
The data indicate there were two radical replacements of the Neanderthal population throughout Eurasia, once 135,000 years ago and again 100,000 years ago. This may be indicative of environmental pressures, possibly caused by cooling climate, that temporarily decimated local hominin groups, says Benjamin Vernot, a population geneticist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.