Neanderthals from Denisova Cave Were Related

NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT—A genetic study of Neanderthal remains recovered from Denisova Cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains revealed that two individuals who lived 10,000 years apart belonged to closely related lineages linked to each other by a common ancestor, according to a Live Science report. The first individual, known as D17, was male and lived about 110,000 years ago. The second genome belonged to a female, known as D5, who lived about 120,000 years ago. “It is likely that Denisova Cave was part of a broader landscape used repeatedly by these Neanderthal populations over time, rather than a site occupied by a single continuous group,” said Diyendo Massilani of the Yale School of Medicine. The study also suggests that Neanderthals who inhabited the Altai region lived in small, isolated populations, since the individuals had large sections of identical DNA. D17 and D5 were more closely related to each other than to Neanderthal populations in Europe or later Neanderthal populations in the Altai region. “What is striking in our results is just how differentiated these populations could become,” Massilani concluded. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For more, go to "Denisovan DNA."