Modern humans in Eurasia carry genetic material inherited from Altai Neanderthals, according to a study published in the journal Genetics. This is noteworthy because past research has shown that Neanderthals connected to a different location — the Vindija Cave in Croatia — have also contributed DNA to modern-day Eurasian populations.
Various Neanderthal populations contributed to extant human genetic variation in a population-specific manner.
“It’s not a single introgression of genetic material from Neanderthals,” said University at Buffalo’s Dr. Omer Gokcumen, senior author of the study.
“It’s just this spider web of interactions that happen over and over again, where different ancient hominins are interacting with each other, and our paper is adding to this picture.”
“This project will now add to an emerging chorus — we’ve been looking into this phenomenon for a couple of years, and there are a couple of papers that came out recently that deal with similar concepts.”
“The picture in my mind now is we have all these archaic hominin populations in Europe, in Asia, in Siberia, in Africa.”
“For one reason or another, the ancestors of modern humans in Africa start expanding in population, and as they expand their range, they meet with these other hominins and absorb their DNA, if you will.”
“We probably met different Neanderthal populations at different times in our expansion into other parts of the globe.”
Dr. Gokcumen and colleagues analyzed the DNA of hundreds of people of Eurasian ancestry.
The goal was to hunt for fragments of genetic material that may have been inherited from Neanderthals.
The researchers found that the Eurasian populations could trace some genetic material back to two different Neanderthal lineages: one represented by a Neanderthal whose remains were discovered in the Vindija cave in Croatia, and another represented by a Neanderthal whose remains were discovered in the Altai mountains.
They also discovered that the modern-day populations they studied also share genetic deletions — areas of DNA that are missing — with both the Vindija and Altai Neanderthal lineages.
The DNA of the Vindija and Altai Neanderthals, along with the modern human populations studied, were previously sequenced by different research teams.
“It seems like the story of human evolution is not so much like at tree with branches that just grow in different directions. It turns out that the branches have all these connections between them,” Dr. Gokcumen said.
“We are figuring out these connections, which is really exciting. The story is not as neat as it was before. Every single ancient genome that is sequenced seems to create a completely new perspective in our understanding of human evolution, and every new genome that’s sequenced in the future may completely change the story again.”
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Ozgur Taskent et al. Analysis of Haplotypic Variation and Deletion Polymorphisms Point to Multiple Archaic Introgression Events, Including from Altai Neanderthal Lineage. Genetics, published online March 31, 2020; doi: 10.1534/genetics.120.303167
