Knowledge: Neanderthals were not fussy partner, they also found in the ... - Tagesspiegel

clock 00:00 by Roland Knauer

image clues. In the Denisova cave are also Neanderthal bones. Photo: Bence Viola

mate choice Neanderthals apparently knew much taboos. Not only close relatives such as half-siblings witnessed another child. Partially included parents on various human lines. The close Kay auditors from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and his colleagues from the genome of a Neanderthal woman whose toe bone was found in the Altai Mountains. The 2.6-inch-long bone was about 50,000 years in the Central Asian Denisova Cave and is relatively well preserved.

Actually, the researchers had expected that the bones of a Denisova people comes -. similar to a finger bones, the team led by Svante Pääbo been studied and thus discovered a previously unknown line of early humans had

“Denisovaner” were more closely related to Neanderthals than to modern humans. Even their genetic material have Leipziger exactly decrypted. “The woman belonged but to the Neanderthals,” says accountant. Thanks to this discovery and sequencing techniques that they have developed, his team was the first fossil Neanderthal DNA as accurately analyze how the genetic makeup of today’s people. They checked each block about 50 times, they write in the journal “Nature”.

This precision allowed them to take a look at the relationships of early humans. Therefore go Neanderthals and Denisovaner on one side and the ancestors of modern humans on the other side since 550000-765000 years own way. Denisovaner and Neanderthals, however, parted just before 381000-473000 years. Especially strictly this separation was not, however. 1.5 to 2.1 percent of the genetic material of people living outside Africa today are typical of Neanderthals. In the DNA of the people on the Asian mainland and Indians can be found 0.2 percent of the genome Denisovaner. This, in turn, had 0.5 percent Neanderthal genome in their cells. Such figures can be only one conclusion: women and men of different groups had common children, who then passed on their genetic material in the lines of Denisovaner, Neanderthals and modern humans

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The genetic material which won the researchers from the toe bones, still tells another story: The parents of the Neanderthal woman were close relatives: about uncle and niece, grandfather and granddaughter or half siblings with the same mother. Presumably, such relationships were not uncommon at that time, the researchers write. Finally, there were very few Denisovaner and Neanderthals – also showing the genetic material. The choice was therefore not too large.

There was also a fourth group: “2.7 to 5.8 percent of the DNA of the Denisovaner comes from a very old early human group,” says accountant. This went his own way since about 900 000 to four million years. Whether it is Homo erectus, is so far speculative. The modern man is just some 30 000 DNA building blocks of Denisovanern and Neanderthals. “These are all the 87 proteins,” says accountant. Maybe they have enabled us to build modern civilization? The Leipzig in any case continue to research. Roland Knauer