A Neanderthal woman who lived and died in a Siberian cave 50,000 years ago has led researchers to the oldest known case of sex between modern humans and their beefy, thick-browed cousins.
Tests revealed that the female, whose remains were recovered from the Altai mountains on the Russia-Mongolia border, carried traces of DNA from Homo sapiens who appear to have mated with her ancestors 100,000 years ago.
The discovery pushes back — by tens of millennia — the date of the first known couplings between the two groups, and shows that both Neanderthals and modern humans inherited DNA from the prehistoric trysts.
Researchers have known since 2010 that people alive today carry as much as 4 percent Neanderthal DNA. The genetic legacy, which might affect human immune systems and the risk of depression and even nicotine addiction, is a smoking gun for interbreeding that took place after modern humans left Africa 60,000 years ago and met up with Neanderthals.
The latest study is the first to ask whether the archaic genes flowed in both directions.
It finds that while European Neanderthals bore no traces of modern human DNA, the Altai Neanderthal did. The scientists narrowed the suspects down to early human pioneers, who left Africa about 40,000 years before the great migration that saw humans colonize the world. Their adventure was not entirely successful: like the Neanderthals, they appear eventually to have died out.
“An early modern human population left Africa much earlier than had been shown before and met with Neanderthals, possibly those moving from Europe towards the East, some time around 100,000 years ago,” said Sergi Castellano, who led the study at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers describe how they compared complete and partial Neanderthal genomes with those from modern Africans, who do not carry Neanderthal DNA. They found no trace of modern human DNA in Neanderthals from Spain or Croatia, but the Altai Neanderthal had strands of DNA that closely matched those of the modern Africans. One strand of modern human DNA found in the Altai Neanderthal involved a gene called FOXP2, which has been linked to language development, but Castellano said it was too early to say whether Neanderthals benefited from the DNA.
Modern humans evolved in Africa about 200,000 years ago. When they left the continent for the north, they encountered Neanderthals who had already settled in Europe and Asia and adapted to the cooler temperatures, lack of sunlight and different diseases. The interbreeding swapped genes among the two groups.
Scientists have other evidence that Homo sapiens left Africa early, but failed to establish themselves beyond the continent. They have recovered 100,000-year-old modern human skeletons from the Skhul and Qafzeh caves in Israel.
Meanwhile, a set of 47 modern human teeth found in a cave in southern China was recently dated to at least 80,000 years old.
“Not only is this the first evidence of modern human DNA entering Neanderthal populations, rather than the reverse process, but this is also a separate and much earlier interbreeding than the one placed at 60,000 years onwards,” said Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.
He said that the interbreeding could have occurred anywhere in southern Asia.
“Does this change the view that the pre-60,000-year-old modern human dispersals failed? If both the early modern human groups and the early intermixed Neanderthals went completely extinct, then this was still ultimately a failed expansion,” he said.
Stringer said scientists cannot say whether sex took place in peaceful relationships, or whether the groups stole each other’s women, or whether abandoned or orphaned babies from one group were adopted by the other.
Adam Siepel, a senior author on the study at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, said: “Because children typically stay with their mother, it may suggest that this was a case where a human man mated with a Neanderthal woman, and then she raised the child in her Neanderthal community, into which it was successfully integrated enough to mate itself.”
“An alternative, and perhaps slightly less likely, scenario would have a Neanderthal man and a human woman mating and integrating as a family into a Neanderthal community — perhaps by coercion or perhaps not,” he said.
Recently, China launched another diplomatic offensive against Taiwan, improperly linking its “one China principle” with UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to constrain Taiwan’s diplomatic space. After Taiwan’s presidential election on Jan. 13, China persuaded Nauru to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Nauru cited Resolution 2758 in its declaration of the diplomatic break. Subsequently, during the WHO Executive Board meeting that month, Beijing rallied countries including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Laos, Russia, Syria and Pakistan to reiterate the “one China principle” in their statements, and assert that “Resolution 2758 has settled the status of Taiwan” to hinder Taiwan’s
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s (李顯龍) decision to step down after 19 years and hand power to his deputy, Lawrence Wong (黃循財), on May 15 was expected — though, perhaps, not so soon. Most political analysts had been eyeing an end-of-year handover, to ensure more time for Wong to study and shadow the role, ahead of general elections that must be called by November next year. Wong — who is currently both deputy prime minister and minister of finance — would need a combination of fresh ideas, wisdom and experience as he writes the nation’s next chapter. The world that
The past few months have seen tremendous strides in India’s journey to develop a vibrant semiconductor and electronics ecosystem. The nation’s established prowess in information technology (IT) has earned it much-needed revenue and prestige across the globe. Now, through the convergence of engineering talent, supportive government policies, an expanding market and technologically adaptive entrepreneurship, India is striving to become part of global electronics and semiconductor supply chains. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Vision of “Make in India” and “Design in India” has been the guiding force behind the government’s incentive schemes that span skilling, design, fabrication, assembly, testing and packaging, and
Can US dialogue and cooperation with the communist dictatorship in Beijing help avert a Taiwan Strait crisis? Or is US President Joe Biden playing into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) hands? With America preoccupied with the wars in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is seeking better relations with Xi’s regime. The goal is to responsibly manage US-China competition and prevent unintended conflict, thereby hoping to create greater space for the two countries to work together in areas where their interests align. The existing wars have already stretched US military resources thin, and the last thing Biden wants is yet another war.