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Human-Neanderthal Lovemaking Was Short-Lived

But the winters that followed it were not most definitely not. Upshot: early Europeans were tough as hell.
The Kostenki man’s skull. Image: Peter the Great Museum

A man who lived 36,000 years ago along the banks of the Don River in Russia has become a key part of our understanding of the harsh world of early European hunter-gatherers. Nicknamed "K14," the man's genome was the examined by an international team led by Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen. The researchers published their results today in Science.

The study revealed two crucial insights into our murky European prehistory. The first is a very accurate estimate of when humans and Neanderthals interbred, resulting in an "admixture event" that has left a genetic stamp on every person of Eurasian heritage. A study published last week estimated this inter-species fling occurred somewhere around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, but Willerslev's team was able to narrow that figure down even further, to 54,000 years ago.

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Now that we've all accepted that we're part Neanderthal, the bigger mystery raised by Willerslev's team is why the affair between the two species was so brief. The low percentage of Neanderthal DNA in modern humans suggests the spark was lost fairly quickly, and when I asked Willerslev why, he called it the "million dollar question."

"No one knows," he told me. "The way forward is to sequence genomes from more ancient humans. To uncover what really happened we need more ancient genomes from the upper Paleolithic."

As if that isn't tantalizing enough for one paper, Willerslev's team also discovered that our earliest European ancestors basically lived through a Game of Thrones world of constant winter. They were subjected to the freezing cold temperatures of the Last Glacial Maximum as a sprawling "meta-population" of three major lineages: Western Eurasians, East Asians, and a mysterious third lineage that has yet to be mapped.

"The conditions in Europe during the last glaciation must have been incredibly harsh, and during the [Last Glacial Maximum], unimaginable," co-author and Cambridge evolutionary biologist Marta Mirazón Lahr told me.

"This is one of the reasons why we think the discovery of the genetic thread uniting Europeans across nearly 40,000 years revealed by the genome from Kostenki is so extraordinary," she continued. "This period corresponds to the most extreme climate modern human populations ever lived through, and although it affected the whole world, it was particularly pronounced in Europe."

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"The fact that the thread survived the upheavals of climate change and the last glacial maximum, when populations fragmented and many disappeared, it is truly amazing," she said."

The archaeological record has provided some insights into how our ancestors coped with these punishing conditions. There is evidence they sewed skins together using needles crafted from bone, and the community at the Kostenki site had sophisticated tents made from mammoth skeletons. "Still, the winters must have been so long and so cold," said Mirazón Lahr.

"The image that comes through is really that of a metapopulation," she continued, "one made up of a myriad of smaller groups, each a splinter off another, each carrying through the imprint of a shared ancestry plus their acquired private adaptations and distinctiveness, some disappearing and others surviving to pass on their genes to the next group."

"The genome of Kostenki reveals the character and diversity of one such group, one so early in this history that his genes were subsequently reshuffled amongst the numerous groups who live in Europe today," she said.

The team produced their results by cross-referencing the Kostenki genome against several specimens across a wide range of periods and backgrounds. Included in the study were ancient Neanderthal fossils, a Palaeolithic boy from Mal'ta in Siberia, and the "Iceman" discovered in the Alps, as well as a sample of thousands of recent human genomes.

Piece by piece, scientists are beginning to close in on the complete story of our earliest ancestors, using their own bodies as genetic witnesses to their trials and upheavals. And given that it already includes a short-lived romance between two species and a period of climate hardship that is unprecedented even today, that story—our own—is shaping up to be a damn dramatic read.