Reconstructing the genetic history of late Neanderthals

Reconstructing the genetic history of late Neanderthals Nature 555, 7698 (2018). doi:10.1038/nature26151 Authors: Mateja Hajdinjak, Qiaomei Fu, Alexander Hübner, Martin Petr, Fabrizio Mafessoni, Steffi Grote, Pontus Skoglund, Vagheesh Narasimham, Hélène Rougier, Isabelle Crevecoeur, Patrick Semal, Marie Soressi, Sahra Talamo, Jean-Jacques Hublin, Ivan Gušić, Željko Kućan, Pavao Rudan, Liubov V. Golovanova, Vladimir B. Doronichev, Cosimo Posth, Johannes Krause, Petra Korlević, Sarah Nagel, Birgit Nickel, Montgomery Slatkin, Nick Patterson, David Reich, Kay Prüfer, Matthias Meyer, Svante Pääbo & Janet Kelso Although it has previously been shown that Neanderthals contributed DNA to modern humans, not much is known about the genetic diversity of Neanderthals or the relationship between late Neanderthal populations at the time at which their last interactions with early modern humans occurred and before they eventually disappeared. Our ability to retrieve DNA from a larger number of Neanderthal individuals has been limited by poor preservation of endogenous DNA and contamination of Neanderthal skeletal remains by large amounts of microbial and present-day human DNA. Here we use hypochlorite treatment of as little as 9 mg of bone or tooth powder to generate between 1- and 2.7-fold genomic coverage of five Neanderthals who lived around 39,000 to 47,000 years ago (that is, late Neanderthals), thereby doubling the number of Neanderthals for wh...
Source: Nature - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Letter Source Type: research
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