Initial Upper Palaeolithic humans in Europe had recent Neanderthal ancestry

Mateja Hajdinjak,Alexander Hübner,Svante Pääbo,Julia Richter,Nikolay Sirakov,Laurits Skov,Virginie Sinet‐Mathiot ,Oana Teodora Moldovan,Geoff Smith ,Elena Endarova,Matthias Meyer,Helen Fewlass,Sahra Talamo,Željko Režek ,Rosen Spasov,Svoboda Sirakova,Qiaomei Fu,Pontus Skoglund,Frido Welker,Lindsey Paskulin,Benjamin Vernot,Benjamin M Peter,Shannon P Mcpherron,Silviu Constantin,Jean‐Jacques Hublin ,Elena Essel,Sarah Nagel,Birgit Nickel,Nikolay Zahariev,Fabrizio Mafessoni,Tsenka Tsanova,Janet Kelso

doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03335-3

Abstract

Modern humans appeared in Europe by at least 45,000 years ago1–5, but the extent of their interactions with Neanderthals, who disappeared by about 40,000 years ago6, and their relationship to the broader expansion of modern humans outside Africa are poorly understood. Here we present genome-wide data from three individuals dated to between 45,930 and 42,580 years ago from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria1,2. They are the earliest Late Pleistocene modern humans known to have been recovered in Europe so far, and were found in association with an Initial Upper Palaeolithic artefact assemblage. Unlike two previously studied individuals of similar ages from Romania7 and Siberia8 who did not contribute detectably to later populations, these individuals are more closely related to present-day and ancient populations in East Asia and the Americas than to later west Eurasian populations. This indicates that they belonged to a modern human migration into Europe that was not previously known from the genetic record, and provides evidence that there was at least some continuity between the earliest modern humans in Europe and later people in Eurasia. Moreover, we find that all three individuals had Neanderthal ancestors a few generations back in their family history, confirming that the first European modern humans mixed with Neanderthals and suggesting that such mixing could have been common.

Highlights

Whereas the roughly 42,000 to 37,000-year-old ‘Oase1’ individual from Romania[7,14] and the roughly 45,000-year-old ‘Ust’Ishim’ individual from Siberia[8] do not show specific genetic relationships to subsequent Eurasian populations, the approximately 40,000-year-old ‘Tianyuan’ individual from China contributed to the genetic ancestry of ancient and present-day East Asian populations[13]
We analyse genome-wide data from human specimens found in direct association with an Initial Upper Palaeolithic (IUP) assemblage of artefacts in Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria[1] (Fig. 1), as well as from two more recent specimens from the same site (Supplementary Information 1)
When comparing the Bacho Kiro Cave individuals to present-day populations[31], we found that the IUP individuals share more alleles with present-day populations from East Asia, Central Asia and the Americas than with populations from western Eurasia (Fig. 2a, Supplementary Information 5), whereas the later BK1653 individual shares more alleles with present-day western Eurasian populations (Extended Data Figs. 3b, 4a)

Summary

Introduction

Whereas the roughly 42,000 to 37,000-year-old ‘Oase1’ individual from Romania[7,14] and the roughly 45,000-year-old ‘Ust’Ishim’ individual from Siberia[8] do not show specific genetic relationships to subsequent Eurasian populations, the approximately 40,000-year-old ‘Tianyuan’ individual from China contributed to the genetic ancestry of ancient and present-day East Asian populations[13]. We analyse genome-wide data from human specimens found in direct association with an Initial Upper Palaeolithic (IUP) assemblage of artefacts in Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria[1] (Fig. 1), as well as from two more recent specimens from the same site (Supplementary Information 1).

Results

Conclusion