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Thursday, October 5, 2017

Upper Paleolithic genomes from Sunghir, Russia (Sikora et al. 2017)


Over at Science at this LINK. Not surprisingly, these four Sunghir individuals are very similar to another Upper Paleolithic Eastern European, Kostenki14, in terms of both genome-wide genetic structure and uniparental markers (Y-haplogroup C1a2, mtDNA-haplogroups U2 and U8c). If you can't access the paper, the supplementary materials are freely available here, and there's a press release here.

Abstract: Present-day hunter-gatherers (HGs) live in multilevel social groups essential to sustain a population structure characterized by limited levels of within-band relatedness and inbreeding. When these wider social networks evolved among HGs is unknown. Here, we investigate whether the contemporary HG strategy was already present in the Upper Paleolithic (UP), using complete genome sequences from Sunghir, a site dated to ~34 thousand years BP (kya) containing multiple anatomically modern human (AMH) individuals. We demonstrate that individuals at Sunghir derive from a population of small effective size, with limited kinship and levels of inbreeding similar to HG populations. Our findings suggest that UP social organization was similar to that of living HGs, with limited relatedness within residential groups embedded in a larger mating network.

M. Sikora et al., Ancient genomes show social and reproductive behavior of early Upper Paleolithic foragers, Science 10.1126/science.aao1807 (2017).

See also...

The genetic history of Ice Age Europe (Qiaomei Fu et al. 2016)

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