An early modern human from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor

Abstract

Neanderthals are thought to have disappeared in Europe ~39,000–41,000 years ago but they have contributed one to three percent of the DNA of present-day people in Eurasia1. Here, we analyze DNA from a 37,000–42,000-year-old2 modern human from Peştera cu Oase, Romania. Although the specimen contains small amounts of human DNA, we use an enrichment strategy to isolate sites that are informative about its relationship to Neanderthals and present-day humans. We find that on the order of six to nine percent of the genome of the Oase individual is derived from Neanderthals, more than any other modern human sequenced to date. Three chromosomal segments of Neanderthal ancestry are over 50 centimorgans in size, indicating that this individual had a Neanderthal ancestor as recently as four to six generations back. However, the Oase individual does not share more alleles with later Europeans than with East Asians, suggesting that the Oase population did not contribute substantially to later humans in Europe.

Palaeoproteomic evidence identifies archaic hominins associated with the Châtelperronian at the Grotte du Renne

“…They are therefore among some of the latest Neandertals in western Eurasia, and possible candidates to be involved in gene flow from Neandertals into AMHs (or vice versa) (48). Future analysis of the nuclear genome of these or other Châtelperronian specimens might be able to provide further insights into the direction, extent, and age of gene flow between Late Pleistocene Western European Neandertals and "incoming" AMHs (49,50).…”

A Genealogical Look at Shared Ancestry on the X Chromosome

“…In forensics, recent ancestry is crucial both for accounting for population-level relatedness (Balding and Nichols 1994) and in familial DNA database searches (Belin et al 1997;Sjerps and Kloosterman 1999). Additionally, recent ancestry detection methods have a range of applications in anthropology and ancient DNA to understand the familial relationships among sets of individuals (KeyserTracqui et al 2003;Haak et al 2008;Baca et al 2012;Fu et al 2015). In population genomics, recent ancestry has been used to learn about recent migrations and other demographic events (Palamara et al 2012;Ralph and Coop 2013).…”

Ancient DNA and human history

“…The most parsimonious explanation for this pattern was that Neanderthals and the ancestors of the present-day non-African populations had interbred in the Middle East, where their ranges were known to have overlapped. This tentative conclusion has been reinforced by numerous later studies, using both additional Neanderthal genomes and the genomes of early modern humans (8,28,29). All Neanderthals genomes sequenced to date show greater similarity to non-Africans than to Africans (8,30).…”

“…More recently, the genome from a 37,000-to 42,000-y-old fossil found in Peştera cu Oase, Romania, provided dramatic confirmation that there was admixture between early modern humans and Neanderthals (29). This genome contained three chromosomal tracts of Neanderthal ancestry longer than 50 cM, indicating that it had a Neanderthal ancestor four to six generations in the past.…”