It looks like the numerous remains of the "Cave of Bones" belong to Neanderthals
Researchers were able to isolate and sequence DNA from remains buried in the famous "Cave of Bones" in Spain. Dating back to 430,000 years old, they open up new chapters in the dramatic history of our species.
Several karst caves in the Sierra de Atapuerca mountain range in northern Spain have been excavated for many decades and have already yielded a number of amazing finds. The most famous was the "Cave of Bones", in a crevice of which, at a depth of 13 m, anthropologists discovered the remains of animals and 28 people, dating back to 430 thousand years. It is believed that they belonged to the ancestors of the Neanderthals of Europe - Heidelberg (Homo heidelbergensis).
Recently, however, a team of scientists working under the guidance of world-renowned Swedish paleogenetist Svante Pääbo was able to partially isolate nuclear DNA from some bones and teeth found in a Spanish cave. After sequencing it, the authors came to the conclusion that the remains - at least those with which the geneticists worked - did not belong to Heidelberg, but to full-fledged Neanderthals. Previously, it was believed that they appeared only 100 thousand years later. The research results are published by the journal Nature.
The authors also noted that by this time the Neanderthals should have separated from the Denisovans, another extinct branch of ancient people, whose partial remains have so far been found only in Altai, although their "genetic traces" are found in other regions. Finally, these data allow us to believe that our direct ancestors also diverged from the common ancestor of the Denisovans and Neanderthals much earlier than it was believed until now.
This "shuffling of cards" on which much of the reasoning of anthropologists is based may cause them to seriously reconsider our views on early human history. It is even possible that the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal was not Homo heidelbergensis, but an even more ancient species, Homo antecessor, which lived between 0.8 and 1.2 million years ago.
However, the picture of our distant past remains very confused, and the "Cave of Bones" is clearly unable to bring final clarity. It is worth noting that a couple of years ago, an analysis of the mitochondrial (not nuclear) DNA of another sample found here was done, and it turned out to be closely related to the Denisovans, and not at all to the Neanderthals. This remains to be explained.
Sergey Vasiliev
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