This Is The First 'Picture' Of a Neanderthal Family
The original Flintstones? The largest genetic study of Neanderthals ever conducted has offered an unprecedented snapshot of a family, including a father and his teenage daughter, who lived in a Siberian cave around 54,000 years ago.
The new research, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, used DNA sequencing to look at the social life of a Neanderthal community, finding that women were more likely to stray from the cave than men.
Previous archaeological excavations have shown that Neanderthals were more sophisticated than once thought, burying their dead and making elaborate tools and ornaments.
However little is known about their family structure or how their society was organised.
The sequencing of the first Neanderthal genome in 2010, which won Swedish paleogeneticist Svante Paabo the medicine Nobel prize earlier this month, offered a new way to discover more about our long extinct forerunners.
An international team of researchers focused on multiple Neanderthal remains found in the Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov caves in southern Siberia.
The scattered fragments of bones were mostly in a single layer in the earth, suggesting the Neanderthals lived around the same time.
"First we had to identify how many individuals we had," Stephane Peyregne, an evolutionary geneticist at Germany's Max Planck Institute and one of the study's co-authors, told AFP.
- 'Seem much more human' -
The team used new techniques to extract and isolate the ancient DNA from the remains.
By sequencing the DNA, they established there were 13 Neanderthals, seven males and six females. Five of the group were children or early adolescents.
Eleven were from the Chagyrskaya cave, many of them from the same family including the father and his teenage daughter,
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