DNA analysis of Siberian humans 45,000 years ago tells us all sorts of interesting things. The tapestry of human development and civilization is richer than we appreciate.
I mean, this was a person. He lived. He struggled. He loved. He had a life. He died. And there are tens of thousands of years of people, like him, across the world — and, again, in a continuum, hominids of various sorts, stretching back tens and hundreds of thousands of years. All of them living, feeling, experiencing.
How cool is that?
Originally shared by +Yonatan Zunger:
In science news, the genome of a man who lived 45,000 years ago in Siberia has been successfully sequenced. There are quite a few fascinating things we can learn from this.
First, his DNA is more like that of non-Africans than that of Africans, but it is no more like Europeans than Asians: that is, he is part of the original migration out of Africa which ultimately branched off into all of the non-African branches of humanity, but before any of that branching occurred. We have here a genetic record of that first group of people.
Second, his DNA contains much longer sequences of Neanderthal DNA than that of modern non-African humans, indicating that their intermixing with the Neanderthals was much more recent. In fact, we can use this to estimate the date of this mixing as being between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago.
And third, this DNA offers good evidence that modern non-African populations are in fact descended from this group, which seems to have moved out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, interbred with the Neanderthals, and spread widely. This suggests that either these were the first humans out of Africa, or that the earlier out-of-Africa migrations (some of which are hypothesized to have happened as early as 200,000 years ago) failed, and modern humans outside of our ancestral continent all came from this last, successful, exodus.
This is the second major finding using this set of techniques for getting DNA out of very old human fossils, the first being the sequencing of a Neanderthal genome last year. Hopefully, this method will continue to prove useful in other fossils, and we'll end up with a much clearer picture of how humans evolved and spread across the world.
So why do I find this interesting? Because there were so many lives and civilizations (I use this term in the loose sense, not the technical anthropological sense) in our distant past. If there were indeed multiple out-of-Africa migrations, as there appear to have been multiple migrations into the Americas, then our society is built upon an incredibly rich set of layers of ruins of older societies still. We have a chance to imagine the worlds of people who arrived in areas genuinely never encountered by humans before; of people who arrived in areas which had been inhabited long before, but later returned to the wild; and perhaps even of people who arrived and encountered other humans, profoundly different from themselves. Our history contains all the elements of good science fiction.
Man’s Genome From 45,000 Years Ago Is Reconstructed – NYTimes.com
The genetic material, extracted from a Siberian fossil, supported a hypothesis that early humans interbred with Neanderthals, and their interaction occurred between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago.
