Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

An ancient fragment of bone discovered in the Crimean cave of Starosele is changing what we think about how and where Neanderthals migrated.

The fragment, now known as Star 1, turned out to be genetically similar to Neanderthal remains previously found in eastern Siberia.

Links to Neanderthals thousands of miles away to the east and west possibly mean that Crimea served as a crossroads during migrations.

Hidden in a dry canyon deep within the Crimean Mountains is the Paleolithic site of Starosele Cave. Archaeologists who recently excavated the site sifted through animal bones, eventually finding a fragment that belonged to a Neanderthal who lived 40-50,000 years ago. What they didn’t know was that this individual’s relatives had been found as far as the eastern extremes of Siberia.

Starosele Cave is known for the human remains that have surfaced since its discovery in the early 1950s. Until now, they had all turned out to be medieval or post-medieval. There was even the famous “Starosele child,” which was thought to represent the transition between Neanderthals and *Homo sapiens, *until later analysis showed that this too was a medieval burial. While remains of Neanderthals on the verge of extinction have been found in the region, which appeared to be a refuge for these hominins, DNA could not be extracted from them.

Now, ancient DNA from the Neanderthal bone fragment known as Star 1 is revealing how they migrated.

Late Neanderthal and early modern human remains are rarely unearthed in Eurasia. Even animal remains from Paleolithic sites are difficult to identify after being gnawed by carnivores, worn down by erosion and taphonomic processes, and moved around by humans. Evolutionary anthropologist Emily Pigott, of the University of Vienna, and her team used Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry (ZooMS) to determine the genus and species of bone specimens. This minimally destructive technique separated the Neanderthal bone fragment, most likely a humerus or femur, from the bones of ancient fauna.

“Genetically, Star 1 is closely related to Neanderthals from the Altai via its mitochondrial DNA, suggesting long-range migrations of Neanderthal groups across Eurasia,” Pigott said in a study recently published in PNAS. “These migrations during favorable climatic conditions likely involved the spread of the Micoquian lithic tradition, indicating both cultural continuity and regional mobility during the Late Pleistocene.”

Whoever this individual was, radiocarbon dating of Star 1 revealed that they lived during the Crimean Micoquian technological period, during which stone was hammered thin and retouched on both sides to produce bifacial tools and weapons. When mitochondrial DNA, which resides in the mitochondria of the cell and is inherited from the maternal side, was analyzed, its origins were found to be far from local. This bone fragment was linked to others from three sites in the Altai mountains of Siberia. Denisova Cave, Chagyrskaya Cave, and Okladnikov Cave are located about 1,864 miles (3,000 km) northeast.

Pigott and her team investigated further by building habitat suitability models that suggested the paleoclimate during interglacial periods, when vast ice sheets that had frozen over during ice ages melted, was most favorable for traveling. Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov are thought to have been seasonal hunting camps. The researchers figured out what could have been the route Neanderthals were most likely to use for trekking from the east of Siberia all the way to the Crimean peninsula, and these groups have more than genes in common.

Faunal bones that date to around the same time period, some of which still have knife marks, show that they hunted horses, bison and other animals that roamed the steppes where they lived. Stone tools excavated from Starosele also bear a remarkable likeness to those in Okladnikov and Chagyrskaya. Pigott’s findings support previous studies that concluded Neanderthals must have spread over long distances, and that the Star 1 discovery could mean Crimea was at the crossroads of a path extending from what is now central Europe all the way to the edge of Siberia.

“It is likely that Neanderthals were in the Altai at two, perhaps even three, different periods,” she said. “Our results show that Starosele was part of a wide-ranging dispersal network of Neanderthals, linked by genes, lithics and behavior.”

[galleryCarousel id=‘9e9354e9-d0c6-426e-ba21-7d41e95744de’ mediaId=‘931514ee-8d09-43f7-852a-9f4c88f1b14f’ display=‘carousel’ align=‘center’ size=‘medium’ share=‘true’ expand=‘’ captions=‘true’ suppress-title=‘false’ hasProducts=‘false’][/galleryCarousel]

You Might Also Like