DNA analysis of the first inhabitants of Russia, whose remains were found in the Vladimir region, helped scientists to reveal their family traditions and find out how the ancestors of modern inhabitants of Europe avoided genetic degeneration, according to an article published in the journal Science.
“In fact, all the inhabitants of Sungir were not related to each other. This is quite surprising, since it suggests that even during the Upper Paleolithic, modern people who lived in very small groups understood the danger of degeneration and deliberately avoided closely related marriages. This means that they have developed some kind of tradition that helps them distinguish between themselves and others, - says Eske Willerslev from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark).
Cell of the Stone Age Society
Scientists believe that the first people appeared in Europe about 40 thousand years ago. Their traces have come down to us only in the form of fossilized bones and fragments of DNA preserved in them. The remains of the "first aborigines of Europe" were found in Romania and in the Russian Ust-Ishim. These people never came into contact with the ancestors of modern humans and died out before their arrival on the subcontinent.
The first ancestors of modern Russians, according to the famous paleogeneticist Johannes Krause, appeared in Europe several thousand years later. Their remains were found in two regions of Russia - in the village of Kostenki near Voronezh and at the Sungir camp near Vladimir. The age of those and other bones is about 34-35 thousand years. Traces of their DNA, mixed with the genetic material of two later waves of migrants, can be found in the genomes of modern northern Europeans.
Villerslev and his colleagues, including anthropologists and geneticists from Moscow State University named after MV Lomonosov and the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, have revealed an interesting detail from the life of the first "Russians" by comparing DNA scraps found in bones from Sungir.
As the Danish geneticist notes, the remains of six people from Sungir - one elderly man, two teenagers and three adults of unknown sex - are unique in that they were all buried at the same time, and these people lived together for a very long time. This gave scientists a unique chance to trace family ties and reveal family traditions of the Stone Age.
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Cave diplomacy
Contrary to the expectations of scientists, the inhabitants of Sungir were not direct relatives - at best, they were cousins to each other, and one of the incomplete skeletons of adult Cro-Magnons belonged, most likely, to one of the great-grandfathers of teenagers.
Interestingly, on the paternal side, they all turned out to be relatives of the “man from Kostenki”, who, as anthropologists believed, had a typical southern appearance and did not resemble the inhabitants of Sungir with their characteristic European appearance - fair skin, dark hair and tall stature.
The surprise of geneticists is associated with the fact that they expected to see traces of genetic degeneration, because all ancient people who lived outside Africa before the end of the ice age lived in small isolated groups, and this sharply limited the number of possible partners for procreation. Willerslev and his colleagues have recently found traces of degeneration in the DNA of Neanderthals who inhabited Altai caves 50-70 thousand years ago.
How did the ancient "Russians" manage to avoid degeneration? According to scientists, populations of people of the Stone Age could maintain constant contact with neighboring groups, exchanging "grooms" and "brides" in the same way as modern aborigines of Australia do and as the tribes of American Indians did before the arrival of Europeans.
According to Villerslev, this is supported by the unusually rich decoration of one of the graves in Sungir, decorated with necklaces and patterns that could serve as a sign of the difference between this population and its neighbors and helped to understand who can be taken as a wife or husband, and who not.
»The jewelry found in Sungir is simply amazing in its beauty, we have never found anything like it in the graves of Neanderthals and other ancient people. This makes us think about the really fundamental questions: what made the people of Sungir the way they were, and how it could have influenced what humanity is today, concludes the Danish geneticist.