Portrait of a Neanderthal family

Neanderthals likely formed small, tight-knit communities where women traveled between groups to live with their mates, while men stayed within the group they were born for life.

That’s per a new study published yesterday in Nature examining ancient DNA that belonged to the earliest known family of Neanderthals, who died together in a Siberian cave ~54,000 years ago.

👣 Background: Neanderthals are an extinct early human relative who lived in Europe and Asia for hundreds of thousands of years, eventually dying-out ~40,000 years ago – shortly after our species (Homo sapiens) migrated to Europe from Africa.

• Little is known about the familial dynamics of Neanderthals due to a lack of available hard evidence. For years, researchers only had clues like footprints – or the layout of caves – from which to draw conclusions about their social structures.

🧬 That brings us to yesterday… when a team of European scientists published the first-ever study of Neanderthal social dynamics using DNA analysis from the remains of 11 individuals.

• The researchers compared the diversity of Y chromosomes (inherited from the father) with that of mitochondrial DNA (inherited from the mother), and found an order of magnitude more mitochondrial diversity – signaling that Neanderthal men stayed in the same group where they were born, but women moved to other groups.

+Worth mentioning: One of the study’s authors, Swedish scientist Svante Pääbo, was awarded the Nobel Prize earlier this month for completing a task in 2010 previously thought to be impossible: sequencing the entire Neanderthal genome with the degraded and contaminated genetic material available to him.