Unearthed by an ivory carver from a Siberian riverbank, a man’s 45,000-year-old thigh bone reveals when people first mated with Neanderthals, an international genetics team reports Wednesday.

The Ust’-Ishim man’s thigh bone is the oldest human bone found so far outside of Africa and the Middle East, according to the report in the journal Nature. It’s nearly twice as old as the next oldest from a modern human, which comes from a boy who died elsewhere in Siberia some 24,000 years ago.

Scientists collected DNA from the bone and analyzed the ancient man’s complete genetic map, or genome. The DNA narrows down the time when mating first brought Neanderthal genes into the human gene pool: from 50,000 to 60,000 years ago.

“It’s really exciting that we now have a really high-quality genome sequence of an early modern human that is this old,” says study author and genetics expert Janet Kelso of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Recent DNA studies led by Max Planck’s Svante Pääbo, another author of the new study, have found traces of Neanderthal in modern people. Typically about 1.6 to 2.1 percent of the genes in people of Eurasian descent are Neanderthal in origin.

Archaeological finds show that Neanderthals and modern humans overlapped in the Middle East as long as 100,000 years ago, says paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. But the new DNA findings seem to rule out mating taking place until much later.

Previous studies put the timing of the earliest human-Neanderthal mating anywhere from 86,000 to 37,000 years ago.

The researchers narrowed that range to 50,000 to 60,000 years ago by calculating the loss of Neanderthal genes over time since the gene swapping occurred. The Ust’-Ishim man had about 2.3 percent Neanderthal genes, but modern people typically have less than 2.1 percent.

Using the mutation rate as a genetic “clock,” the researchers extrapolated back to determine the era when modern humans picked up genes from Neanderthals.

“I think the paper is pretty convincing on this,” Hawks says. But he cautions that the idea of a single time of human mating with Neanderthals “almost certainly is an oversimplification. The contacts could have extended over a longer period.”

A possible second, more recent, episode may explain slightly higher numbers of Neanderthal genes common today in East Asians, according to the study.

Full Report: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141022-siberian-genome-ancient-science-discovery/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ng%2FNews%2FNews_Main+(National+Geographic+News+-+Main)

I wonder how compatible our genomes were for successful mating, there could have been lots of sex between the species but very few successful pregnancies let alone actual births.

Cymek said:

I wonder how compatible our genomes were for successful mating, there could have been lots of sex
between the species but very few successful pregnancies let alone actual births.

I don’t know about that

Imagine if everyone put their genes in to a central databank and a computer analysed it all and mapped out everyone’s relatives

7 billion+ people in a Family tree

> The Ust’-Ishim man had about 2.3 percent Neanderthal genes, but modern people typically have less than 2.1 percent.

No.

According to tests done on my DNA by the company “23andme” I’m 3.0% Neanderthal. The average European is 2.7% Neanderthal. That gives Ust’-Ishim man less than the average percentage of Neanderthal DNA rather than more. Unless there’s a different way of measuring percent

mollwollfumble said:

> The Ust’-Ishim man had about 2.3 percent Neanderthal genes, but modern people typically have less than 2.1 percent.

No.

According to tests done on my DNA by the company “23andme” I’m 3.0% Neanderthal. The average European is 2.7% Neanderthal. That gives Ust’-Ishim man less than the average percentage of Neanderthal DNA rather than more. Unless there’s a different way of measuring percent

maybe some people have less than 2.1 percent while other people have more than 2,1 percent

I have know idea about mine yet

• Unless there’s a different way of measuring percent

Well there is w/w, w/v, v/v, etc.

furious said:

• Unless there’s a different way of measuring percent

Well there is w/w, w/v, v/v, etc.

I was thinking more along the lines of % base pairs, % genes, % psuedogenes.

Scientists pinpoint when humans had babies with Neanderthals
Neanderthals interbred with modern humans 47,000 years ago, passing down DNA that still exists in many modern-day people, according to two new studies.

December 12, 2024 at 2:00 p.m. EST Today at 2:00 p.m. EST
By Carolyn Y. Johnson

A pair of new studies sheds light on a pivotal but mysterious chapter of the human origin story, revealing that modern humans and Neanderthals had babies together for an extended period, peaking 47,000 years ago — leaving genetic fingerprints in modern-day people.

You are what you read. Reveal your 2024 reader type with Newsprint.
Scientists have long known that Neanderthals and humans had offspring and that among them were our ancestors. Today, people from around the world who are descended from the group of humans that left Africa and successfully settled Eurasia still contain a vestige of Neanderthal DNA in their genomes.

But the timing and specifics of these interspecies pairings have been debated. The new results, published Thursday in the journals Science and Nature, don’t upend our understanding of this period but enrich it with complexities and details.

To gain greater insight, one group of scientists analyzed genomes from 275 present-day and 59 prehistoric humans who lived between 2,200 and 45,000 years ago, looking for segments of Neanderthal DNA and trying to estimate when they entered the human genome. They report in Science that Neanderthals and humans interbred for 7,000 years starting about 50,500 years ago.

A second group of researchers disclosed in Nature a new line of evidence by sequencing the oldest human genomes yet, bringing to life a 45,000-year-old human family, including a mother and baby whose Neanderthal ancestry traced to 80 generations earlier.

“It paints a different story than this rare encounter. Whenever you ran into a Neanderthal, it was okay to have a baby with a Neanderthal,” said Fernando Villanea, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who was not involved in the studies. “It just paints this story that makes sense to how the real world works. For a long period of time, humans were running into Neanderthals, and they were having babies.”

Using DNA to time travel
Modern humans, Homo sapiens, originated in Africa about 300,000 years ago. Somewhere around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, a key group left the continent and encountered Neanderthals, a hominin relative that was established across western Eurasia but went extinct about 39,000 years ago.

Neanderthals have often been caricatured as brutish and primitive, and for years scientists debated whether they ever interbred with humans.

Research into ancient DNA, which won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2022, proved that Neanderthals are our ancestors, too. Today, people who descended from the population that left Africa still have faint remnants of Neanderthal ancestry in their genome — somewhere between 1 and 3 percent of their DNA. That includes genes involved in skin pigmentation, the immune response and even whether you’re a morning person.

The nature, duration and frequency of “admixture events” — when humans and Neanderthals paired up and had offspring — has long been unclear. The Science paper suggests these weren’t exceptional trysts but a way of life. Over a 7,000-year period beginning about 50,000 years ago, Neanderthals and humans had babies. For a large part of the modern-day population who trace their ancestry to the group that left Africa, 1 out of every 20 ancestors would have been a Neanderthal during this time period.

Genetics can’t reveal where this interbreeding happened, but many scientists speculate it occurred in the Middle East.

“Obviously, we cannot time travel, but this data is allowing us to time travel and see what’s happening 50,000 years ago in our history,” said Priya Moorjani, an assistant professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley and a senior author of the study published in Science.

The study also underscores that our branch of humanity is just one of many on the family tree. The group of humans that left Africa didn’t depart as a monolithic group, with one prolonged multimillennia fling with Neanderthals. Some mingled with Neanderthals repeatedly but died out. Others arrived in Europe far earlier than the migration that led to present-day people but didn’t make it to the present.

A “cool thing is that we begin to see that the very first modern humans that came to Europe were divided into different populations, some of which mixed with Neandertals locally in Europe … and others that did not,” Svante Paabo, an evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, wrote in an email. Ancient DNA recovered from human remains in Romania and Bulgaria, for example, reveal humans who lived more than 40,000 years ago but had quite recent Neanderthal ancestors.

“Interesting also that none of these contributed their DNA to present-day people in Europe,” said Paabo, who was not involved in the new study.

The oldest modern human family
Beneath a castle in Ranis, Germany, an archaeological excavation in the 1930s unearthed ancient bone fragments and stone tools from more than 41,000 years ago. Archaeologists debated if these tools, from what’s called the Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician culture, were made by humans or Neanderthals.

Drawing on a more recent excavation of the same site and by sifting painstakingly through dozens of boxes to find bone fragments that might have been misclassified as coming from other animals, researchers were able to gather enough DNA to reveal who this mystery population was. A research team led by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology showed this year, using one kind of DNA, that they were humans who lived 45,000 years ago.

In the Nature paper, they were able to reconstruct their genomes. A mother and baby daughter, as well as another relative, were among a half-dozen individuals at the site. To their surprise, they also found that two of the Ranis individuals could have been distant cousins or great-great-great grandparents or children of a female whose skull was unearthed at Zlaty kun in the Czech Republic.

“Ranis is very exciting and gives us some sort of insight into the oldest modern human family that we have genetic data for,” said Arev P. Sümer, a computational biologist at Max Planck and the lead author of the Nature paper.

While these individuals are not related to modern-day people, they are a very close branch of the family tree. About 47,000 years ago, 80 generations before these people were born, their ancestors included Neanderthals — in the same interbreeding event that is a part of our history.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/12/12/neanderthals-humans-interbreeding/?

Bump

Humans and Neanderthals met often, but only one event matters
The mystery of exactly how people left Africa deepens

Dec 12th 2024

In 2010 researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (EVA), in Leipzig, published the genome of Homo neanderthalensis, a species known in less progressive days as Neanderthal man. This contained stretches of DNA also found in Homo sapiens genomes—specifically, non-African ones. That suggested past interbreeding between the two, but only outside Africa. This is not surprising. Homo sapiens began in Africa but Neanderthals were Eurasian. Any miscegenation would have happened after sapiens left its homeland to embark on its conquest of the world. But the details were unclear.

Now, two papers by researchers at EVA and elsewhere have provided more precise details about when the two species of humans mixed. They conclude that sapiens-neanderthalensis crossings occurred several times, but the consequences of only one such hybridisation, shortly before Neanderthals became extinct, 40,000 years ago, remain important today. This is more recent than previously thought.

One paper, in Science, looks at 334 sapiens genomes, 275 from the present and the rest between 2,200 and 45,000 years old. All show Neanderthal DNA getting into sapiens genomes over an extended period sometime between 43,500 and 50,500 years ago. Four also have signs of other such ingressions. The second paper, in Nature, looks at only seven genomes, each around 45,000 years old.

The analyses raise questions. Other work suggests Homo sapiens arrived in some places before the interbreeding dates indicated, yet the Neanderthal DNA concerned is ubiquitous outside Africa. Also, though bands of sapiens leaving Africa via Sinai might have run into Neanderthals, since this was the southern limit of that species’ range, those crossing via the straits between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden—believed by some to have been an important route as well—would not have done. Constructing a human migration pattern that takes account of all this, yet yields the distribution of Neanderthal DNA seen today, is tricky. But it must have happened somehow.

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/12/12/humans-and-neanderthals-met-often-but-only-one-event-matters?