Sex and the Siberian Neanderthal: Incest and inter-species action

Neanderthals

Nidhi Subbaraman NBC News

Dec. 18, 2013 at 1:01 PM ET

Bence Viola

Researchers extracted DNA from this toe bone of a Siberian Neanderthal female who lived about 50,000 years ago.

The first high-quality genome sequence of a Siberian Neanderthal female is throwing up racy details about our ancient relatives sex lives: Siberian Neanderthals mated within their families, the new research shows, while another group, the Denisovans, interbred with Neanderthals, humans and a third, as yet undiscovered mystery hominin living in Asia.

The first anthropologists relied on skull shapes and bone lengths of fossils to identify ancestors in the hominin family tree. Recently though, geneticists have bulked up their toolset, and have identified new species from material taken from mere milligrams of bone. This time, they didn't even need that.

"There is not even a bone splinter here," Svante Pbo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, said of the unknown species. "Its an inference from those other genomes."

By comparing genetic evidence of the Neanderthal female who lived some 50,000 years ago, with the sequence of a Denisovan girl published in August last year, Pbo and team discovered a small but discrete signature of a much older species, which the paleoanthropologists suspect might be Homo erectus. The full analysis of the Siberian Neanderthal genome is published in the Thursday issue of Nature.

Bence Viola

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Sex and the Siberian Neanderthal: Incest and inter-species action