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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.