An early modern human from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor

By Qiaomei Fu, M. Hajdinjak, O. Moldovan, S. Constantin, Swapan Mallick, P. Skoglund, Nick Patterson, N. Rohland, Iosif Lazaridis, B. Nickel and 6 more. Nature, 2015

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Neanderthals are thought to have disappeared in Europe approximately 39,000–41,000 years ago but they have contributed 1–3% of the DNA of present-day people in Eurasia. Here we analyse DNA from a 37,000–42,000-year-old modern human from Peştera cu Oase, Romania. Although the specimen contains small amounts of human DNA, we use an enrichment strategy to isolate sites that are informative about its relationship to Neanderthals and present-day humans. We find that on the order of 6–9% of the genome of the Oase individual is derived from Neanderthals, more than any other modern human sequenced to date. Three chromosomal segments of Neanderthal ancestry are over 50 centimorgans in size, indicating that this individual had a Neanderthal ancestor as recently as four to six generations back. However, the Oase individual does not share more alleles with later Europeans than with East Asians, suggesting that the Oase population did not contribute substantially to later humans in Europe.

Subfields: Archeology, Genetics, Paleontology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b28717c96fc695b8e486d0143893c90a4791ce61

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Citations in the corpus

From the field to the laboratory: Controlling DNA contamination in human ancient DNA research in the high-throughput sequencing era (2017, positive): “Patterns of aDNA damage are also used to computationally quantify and discard contaminating sequences, assuming the putative contaminating DNA comes from modern-day humans and is relatively intact (Skoglund et al. 2014; Fu et al. 2015; Meyer et al. 2016; Meyer et al. 2014; Renaud et al. 2015).”
Ancient DNA and the rewriting of human history: be sparing with Occam’s razor (2016, background): “DNA from a 37,000–42,000-year-old modern human from Romania (named Oase) had 6–9 % Neanderthalderived alleles, including three large segments of Neanderthal ancestry of over 50 centimorgans in size, suggesting that Oase had a Neanderthal ancestor as a fourth-, fifthor sixth-degree relative [20].”
The genetic history of Ice Age Europe (2016, background): “That analysis suggested that the population to which Kostenki14 belonged harbored within it the three major lineages that exist in mixed form in Europe today15: (1) a lineage related to all later pre-Neolithic Europeans, (2) a “Basal Eurasian” lineage that split from the ancestors of Europeans and E”
Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians (2015, background): “At least 14 kurgans were counted, and four were excavated (1, 2, 10, 11).”