Published 19 May 2021 at 17.39
Domestic. For the first time, the entire genome of the 35,000-year-old skulls of the woman Peştera Muierii 1, in Romania, has been extracted. Now a research group has clarified her complete DNA.
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Peştera Muierii 1 is called one of the three individuals from which remains have been found in the cave of the same name. Peştera Muierii Cave (Hungarian Women's Cave) is the name of a cave system in Baia de Fier in southern Romania.
The cave system is known for its remains from cave bears and for finding skulls and other parts from three different female individuals who lived there about 35,000–40,000 years ago.
– She is a little more like us than the individuals in Europe who are five thousand years older, but the difference is much smaller than we thought. We can see that she is not a direct forerunner of us who live in Europe today, but she is a forerunner of the hunter-gatherer groups that lived in Europe until the end of the ice age, says Mattias Jakobsson, professor at the Department of Organismal Biology at Uppsala University, which has led the study, in a mailing.
There are very few complete genetic predispositions – through – that are older than 30,000 years that have been sequenced. When the research team can now read the entire genome from Peştera Muierii 1, they can see similarities with what people have today in Europe, but they can also see that she is not an ancestor of us.
Other researchers have seen in previous studies that the shape of her skull has similarities to both modern humans and Neanderthals. Therefore, it has been assumed that she was genetically more similar to Neanderthals than other contemporary individuals, and in that way stood out from the norm. However, the genetic analysis in the current study shows that she has the same low level of Neanderthal DNA as most other remains of individuals who lived at the same time. Compared to the remains of some individuals who lived 5,000 years earlier, such as Peştera Oase 1, she had only half as many Neanderthal genes.
An important period in the history of mankind is when modern man spreads and begins to move out of Africa about 80,000 years ago and which is usually described as a genetic bottleneck. Populations migrated from the African continent to Asia and Europe. We still see the effects of the relocation today. The genetic variation is lower in the populations outside Africa than in the populations in Africa.
The fact that Peştera Muierii 1 has a high genetic diversity indicates that the greatest loss of genetic diversity occurs during the last ice age, (which ends for about 10,000 BC) than with the out-of-Africa migration.
– This is exciting because it teaches us more about the early population history in Europe. Peştera Muierii 1 has much more genetic variation than was thought to exist in Europe at this time. This shows that the genetic variation outside Africa was large until the last ice age, and that it is the ice age that leads to reduced variation in people outside Africa, says Mattias Jakobsson.
The researchers were also able to follow the genetic variation in Europe during the last 35,000 years and sees there a clear decrease in the variation during the last ice age. Reduced genetic diversity has previously been linked to the fact that harmful gene variants are more common in populations outside Africa, but this has been a contentious issue.