Ancient DNA samples taken from the remains of two women found in a mountain cave in the Russian Far East suggest that they have close family ties with people living in this remote and cold corner of Asia today. The new discovery also indicates that in this region, farming and livestock production spread through gradual cultural changes, rather than an influx of people engaged in arable farming and livestock raising.
“The main thing is that we found the integrity of the chain and the continuity that has been preserved for seven thousand years,” says Mark Stoneking, who works in Leipzig at the Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology of the Max Planck Society and was not involved in this study. In many other archaeological sites in Russia, Europe and America, the situation is different. There, ancient people are rarely relatives of those who live in these places today. This is due to powerful waves of migration and population mixing since the advent of agriculture about 12 thousand years ago.
The remains of ancient women, whose age is 7,700 years, were found in the Devil's Gate Cave. The site was of particular interest to geneticist Andrea Manica of the University of Cambridge, Britain, because five human skeletons were found, along with pottery, jails and the remains of nets and mats woven from the twisted hard leaves of cane calamus, which some (but not all) scientists consider it a rudimentary crop.
DNA samples were taken from the teeth, ossicles and other bones of the skull of two skeletons found at Devil's Gate. Hungarian graduate student Veronika Siska has been able to sequence enough nuclear genomes to compare it with hundreds of modern Europeans and Asians. The researchers found that the two women from the Devil's Gate Cave are closest to the Ulchi indigenous people, who today live several hundred kilometers north of the cave in the Amur River basin. There the Ulchi have long been engaged in fishing, hunting and a little farming. It was also discovered that these women are related to other peoples who speak 75 existing or endangered Tungus languages and live in Eastern Siberia and China. In addition, their distant relationship with modern Koreans and Japanese was revealed.
Outwardly, these women are also similar to the people living in the Amur basin today. Their genes indicate that they had brown eyes, thick and straight hair like that of Asian peoples, skin like that of an Asians, and spatulate incisors like that of Asians. They also had lactose intolerance, meaning that their bodies did not metabolize the sugar in milk. Therefore, it is entirely possible that they did not breed dairy animals.
The Ulchi and other Amur groups have no signs that they have inherited a significant amount of DNA from some other, later peoples, as the research team reported today in Science Advances. This indicates that they were part of one continuous ethnic community that evolved in this region for at least 7,700 years. If so, it means that not large groups of migrants brought agriculture to this remote and cold corner of Asia. Most likely, says Manika, local hunters and gatherers began to take care of it, gaining experience in farming, which gradually became part of their way of life.
Some paleogeneticists agree that the study found a striking connection and continuity between ancient cave women and the Ulchi. However, they disagree about how agriculture came to be in the area: through the spread of ideas or through the influx of farmers, as in Europe. There, Anatolian farmers from the Middle East 8-12 thousand years ago came to Europe along with tools, seeds and domesticated animals, displacing or mixing with local hunters and gatherers. “Two specimens from Devil's Gate Cave are hunter-gatherers, and this result tells us little about the spread of [highly developed] agriculture,” notes paleogeneticist David Reich of Harvard University.
However, archaeologist Francesco d'Errico, who works in France at the University of Bordeaux, thinks differently. In his opinion, archeology and genetics in Europe and now in East Asia indicate that agriculture spread in different places in different ways. “It is a complex process in which in some cases people migrated with their knowledge and tools, and in some only the tools of labor moved,” says d'Errico, who was not involved in the study. The best way to test these hypotheses, Stoneking says, is to obtain samples of ancient DNA from the remains of the earliest farmers in the region.
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Ann Gibbons