Nobel laureate's latest Nature paper: the largest Neanderthal genetics study to date, mapping Neanderthal family portraits

The team suggests that the best explanation for these findings is a small community (about 20 individuals) in which 60 percent or more of women come from other groups and join their partner's family, while men stay in their original community
.

Neanderthalensis lived in western Eurasia about 430,000 to 40,000 years ago and are close relatives
of modern humans (Homo sapiens).
About 70,000 years ago, Homo sapiens groups migrated from Africa to the Middle East and from there began migrating to the rest of the
world.
Thus, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted for tens of thousands of years in
many parts of Eurasia.

On October 3, 2022, Swedish scientist Svante Pääbo received this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discoveries in the extinct hominin genome and human evolution, providing key insights
into the human immune system and how humans compare to their extinct close relatives (Neanderthals, Denisovans).

Details: Where do we humans come from? Why unique? Systematic interpretation of the research results of Svent Pääb, winner of the New Kono Prize

Currently, genetic data on the formation of nuclear DNA extracted from a total of 18 Neanderthal individuals (reports from multiple studies) have provided an extensive review of this population, but we still know very little
about its social organization.

On October 19, 2022, Svante Pääbo and others published a research paper
in Nature entitled Genetic insights into the social organization of Neanderthals.

The study is the first to describe the kinship and social organization
of small Neanderthal communities.
The findings, based on an analysis of the ancient DNA of 13 individual Neanderthals found in two caves in Asia, provide new insights
into the social organization of Neanderthals.
It is also the largest known genetic study
of Neanderthals to date.

The team obtained and analyzed genetic data
from 11 Neanderthal individuals from the Chagyrskaya Cave and 2 from the Okladnikov Cave, both in the Altai Mountains of Siberia, Russia.

They found that some of Chagyrskaya's individuals were close relatives, including a father and his teenage daughter, as well as two second-degree relatives
.
These results suggest that at least some of them lived in the same period
.
The authors also found that the genetic diversity of the Y chromosome (transmitted in the paternal line) in these individuals was much lower than that of mitochondrial DNA (transmitted in the maternal line), suggesting that females were more likely to migrate
than males.

The team suggests that the best explanation for these findings is a small community (about 20 individuals) in which 60 percent or more of women come from other groups and join their partner's family, while men stay in their original community
.

Finally, the research team cautions that due to the small sample size, it may not be representative of the social life of
the entire Neanderthal population.
Therefore, future research should include more individuals from other communities to bring more insights
to our understanding of this close relative.