Initial Upper Palaeolithic humans in Europe had recent Neanderthal ancestry.

ABSTRACT: Modern humans appeared in Europe by at least 45,000 years ago^1-5, but the extent of their interactions with Neanderthals, who disappeared by about 40,000 years ago⁶, and their relationship to the broader expansion of modern humans outside Africa are poorly understood. Here we present genome-wide data from three individuals dated to between 45,930 and 42,580 years ago from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria^1,2. They are the earliest Late Pleistocene modern humans known to have been recovered in Europe so far, and were found in association with an Initial Upper Palaeolithic artefact assemblage. Unlike two previously studied individuals of similar ages from Romania⁷ and Siberia⁸ who did not contribute detectably to later populations, these individ

SUBMITTER: Hajdinjak M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8026394 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature