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Neanderthals were doomed

01.03.2012

A group of Swedish and Spanish researchers from Uppsalla, Stockholm and Madrid reported in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution the news that "whitewashed" our African ancestors - according to scientists, Neanderthals themselves began to rapidly die out long before the first foot of a modern man set foot on their territory. .

Until now, it was believed that Neanderthals lived steadily in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years until our ancestors got tired of Africa. Now it turns out that it wasn't quite like that. According to scientists, Neanderthals began to die out sharply somewhere around 50 thousand years ago. After most of them died out, a small group of surviving Neanderthals populated the central and western parts of Europe, where they managed to live for another ten thousand years, until the Cro-Magnons, modern people, appeared on the scene.

This assumption was made by the Swedish-Spanish group on the basis of data obtained during the study of the DNA of Neanderthals. According to them, European Neanderthals, who lived during the last ten thousand years before the advent of modern man, have very small genetic differences. Their genomes differed even less than the genomes of the inhabitants of today's Iceland differ. This means that the DNA almost did not mutate, that is, the Neanderthals themselves did not adapt in any way to the sharp climatic changes of that time and therefore were already doomed from the very beginning.

Older fossils of European Neanderthals show much greater genomic variation - about the same level as that recorded in Asian Neanderthals and representatives of today's humanity. It is still completely unclear why the DNA of European Neanderthals 50 thousand years ago was suddenly attacked by such literally murderous conservatism.

Paleogenetics is a very difficult task. Researchers are dealing with very time-destroyed DNA, from which it is extremely difficult to extract at least some information. Scientists had to resort to the help of a wide variety of experts - statisticians, experts in modern DNA sequencing, paleoanthropologists, IT specialists, etc. from Denmark, Spain and the USA. To get to the genetic information about Neanderthals, they needed special laboratory equipment, special computational methods. From such interdisciplinary cooperation, they expect no less amazing discoveries about the life of our great-ancestors.

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