By sequencing 523 ancient humans, we show that the primary source of ancestry in modern South Asians is a prehistoric genetic gradient between people related to early hunter-gatherers of Iran and Southeast Asia. After the Indus Valley Civilization’s decline, its people mixed with individuals in the southeast to form one of the two main ancestral populations of South Asia, whose direct descendants live in southern India. Simultaneously, they mixed with descendants of Steppe pastoralists who, starting around 4000 years ago, spread via Central Asia to form the other main ancestral population. The Steppe ancestry in South Asia has the same profile as that in Bronze Age Eastern Europe, tracking a movement of people that affected both regions and that likely spread the distinctive features shared between Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages.
Neanderthals and Denisovans are extinct groups of hominins that separated from each other more than 390,000 years ago. Here we present the genome of 'Denisova 11', a bone fragment from Denisova Cave (Russia) and show that it comes from an individual who had a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father. The father, whose genome bears traces of Neanderthal ancestry, came from a population related to a later Denisovan found in the cave. The mother came from a population more closely related to Neanderthals who lived later in Europe than to an earlier Neanderthal found in Denisova Cave, suggesting that migrations of Neanderthals between eastern and western Eurasia occurred sometime after 120,000 years ago. The finding of a first-generation Neanderthal-Denisovan offspring among the small number of archaic specimens sequenced to date suggests that mixing between Late Pleistocene hominin groups was common when they met.
The Altai region of Siberia was inhabited for parts of the Pleistocene by at least two archaic hominin groups-Denisovans and Neanderthals. Denisova Cave uniquely contains stratified deposits with the skeletal and genetic remains of both hominins, artefacts made from stone and other materials, and a range of animal and plant remains. The previous site chronology is based largely on radiocarbon ages for fragments of bone and charcoal up to 50,000 years old, with older ages of equivocal reliability estimated from thermoluminescence and palaeomagnetic analyses of sediments and genetic analyses of hominin DNA. Here we describe the stratigraphic sequences in Denisova Cave, establish a chronology for the Pleistocene deposits and associated remains from optical dating of the cave sediments, and reconstruct the environmental context to hominin occupation from around 300,000 to 20,000 years ago. The period of existence and geographical distribution of Neanderthals and their sister group, dubbed the Denisovans 1,2 , are key unresolved issues in the study of human evolution and dispersal. Denisovan remains are known only from the type locality of Denisova Cave, which is located in the foothills of the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia (51°23′51.3′′N, 84°40′34.3′′E; Fig. 1a). Neanderthal remains have also been recovered from the cave deposits.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.