1,500-year-old Crypt of Rich Warrior Buried With Wife and Children Discovered in Ancient Russian City
An Ancient warrior has been unearthed from a Russian crypt, buried alongside his wife and three children. The discovery has sparked an archaeological mystery, with experts unable to confirm whether the family died from plague – or were butchered by local tribesmen.
The Russian crypt was littered with bodies
The family was buried 16 feet below ground
Rare artefacts buried with the family indicate high status or wealth
Archaeologists say the “noble” family was buried at the site in Fanagoriya, Russia around 1,500 years ago. The adult male skeleton was found buried with riding stirrups and spurs, according to the Russian Academy of Sciences.
He was also equipped with a sword belt, which suggests he was a mounted warrior.
And the 16-foot-deep crypt also contained valuables, indicating wealth or high status.
Archaeologists think the family may have been butchered by local tribesmen
It’s likely the crypt belongs to a noble warrior family
It’s also possible that the family were killed by plague
Skeletons were unearthed at the lost Russian city of Fanagoriya, founded by Ancient Greek colonists
This ancient warrior may have been like a real-life version of Khal Drogo from Game of Thrones.
“Judging by what we have found here, the man served the city’s army,” said Aleksei Voroshilov, who led the dig.
“He was a horseman because we found riding stirrups and spurs too.
“There is also a leather harness attached to a belt, which was used to carry a sword.
“The buckles on the harness are really worn out, which means this warrior has seen a lot of fighting.
“He was unsheathing and sheathing his sword again and again.”
The long-dead warrior was also buried alongside his wife and three children.
It’s not clear how they died, but archaeologists believe they may have been killed by the plague.
Another leading theory is that they were butchered by nomadic tribesmen in the local area.
The eerie burial site was dug 1,500 years ago.
The ancient lost city has produced important artefacts
In any case, the dig site at Fanagoriya is of huge interest to archaeologists.
The site is believed to have major historical importance to Christianity and has produced a number of rare artefacts.
“This year we have discovered very accurate and strong evidence that Christianity was founded in Fanagoriya in the fifth century, which is a marble tabletop, which could be used as an altar in a church,” said Aleksei.
“We have discovered a marble baptistery for infants or probably for toddlers as well. It is not very big, nevertheless, it is massive and made from marble.
“One of our underwater expeditions discovered a ship some time ago, which was sunk following the uprising in Fanagoriya against Mithridates VI of Pontus which occurred exactly in 62 BC.
“This ship is one of the most ancient ones ever found in the world.”
Oman has recovered an exceptional collection of silver jewellery from a prehistoric grave
From a prehistoric grave dating to the 3rd millennium BC in Dahwa, North Batinah, a team of international archaeologists working under the auspices of the Oman Ministry of Heritage and Tourism have unearthed an extraordinary collection of silver jewellery.
The joint Omani-American team headed by professor Nasser al Jahwari and professor Khaled Douglas from Sultan Qaboos University and professor Kimberly Williams from Temple University, Philadelphia USA, excavate an early bronze age site and Dahwa, Wilayat of Saham of North Al Batinah Governorate.
The collection includes parts of necklaces with beads and several rings.
Stone seal from Mohenjo Dara (Sindh, Pakistan), with the same image of an Indian bison head, lowered into a manger.
One of the silver rings, interestingly, bore a stamp depicting an Indian bison (Bos Gaurus), a defining symbol of the Indus Valley (or Harappa) Culture that suggested the merchants were engaged in interregional trade.
Although quite common on Indus-related circular stone seals in Iran, Bahrain, Mesopotamia, and Oman, this image was relatively uncommon in the Indus Valley.
In fact, it was discovered engraved on stamp seals made from local soft stone in Oman at Salut and Al-Moyassar. This is, however, the first time this image has been discovered on a metal finger ring.
Tomb 1 in Dahwa was interred with silver jewelry, pottery, stone vessels, and other personal ornaments.
According to professor Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, an expert on ancient technologies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, seal rings are typical of much later periods.
“But this discovery confirms that Bronze Age peoples were much more ingenious and technically advanced than previously thought. They introduced at a very early stage administrative solutions that allowed economic growth in the later millennia.”
What makes the find even more intriguing is the fact that the jewelry found is made of silver that most likely came from Anatolia (Turkey).
A Christian monastery, possibly pre-dating Islam, found in UAE
A Christian monastery has been discovered on the island of Siniyah off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), possibly dating back to the years before the spread of Islam to the Arabian Peninsula.
Archaeologists have discovered similar churches and monasteries in Iran and other Persian Gulf countries. Early churches and monasteries are thought to have spread from the Persian Gulf to the coasts of modern-day Oman and all the way to India.
The Siniyah Island monastery, part of the sand-dune sheikhdom of Umm al-Quwain, sheds new light on the history of early Christianity along the Persian Gulf’s shores.
The monastery is located on Siniyah Island, a barrier island protecting the Khor al-Beida marshlands in Umm al-Quwain, an emirate along the Persian Gulf coast about 30 miles northeast of Dubai. Carbon dating of samples found in the monastery’s foundation dates between 534 and 656.
It marks the second such monastery found in the Emirates, dating back as many as 1,400 years — long before its desert expanses gave birth to a thriving oil industry which led to a unified nation home to the high-rise towers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
Scholars believe the two monasteries were lost to history as Christians gradually converted to Islam as Islam became more prevalent in the region.
Observers visit an ancient Christian monastery on Siniyah Island in the United Arab Emirates on Thursday.
For Timothy Power, an associate professor of archaeology at the United Arab Emirates University who helped investigate the newly discovered monastery, the UAE today is a “melting pot of nations.”
“The fact that something similar was happening here 1,000 years ago is really remarkable, and this is a story that deserves to be told,” he said.
The floor plan of the monastery on Siniyah Island suggests that early Christians may have prayed inside a single-aisle church there. Rooms within appear to hold a baptismal font, as well as an oven for baking bread or wafers for communion rites. Additionally, an altar and a setup for communion wine were probably located in a nave.
Next to the monastery is a second structure with four rooms arranged around a courtyard, which could have been the home of an abbot or a bishop in the early church.
Archaeologists discovered the first Christian monastery in the UAE in the early 1990s on Sir Bani Yas Island, which is now a nature preserve and home to luxury hotels off the coast of Abu Dhabi, near the Saudi border. It dates back to the same period as the new find in Umm al-Quwain.
Ancient Snail From 99 Million Years Ago Discovered With Hairs Growing on Shell
A snail preserved in amber with an intact fringe of tiny delicate bristles along its shell is helping biologists better understand why one of the world’s slimiest animals might evolve such a groovin’ hairstyle.
The 99-million-year-old amber contains the tiny snail.
This unusual mollusc fossil, found in the Hukawng Valley of Myanmar, has lines of stiff, miniscule hairs, each between 150 and 200 micrometres long, following the swirl of its 9-millimetre long, 3.1-millimetre high shell.
It’s not the first hairy snail discovered, either, joining an exclusive club of coifed gastropods.
“This is already the sixth species of hairy-shelled Cyclophoridae – a group of tropical land snails – found so far, embedded in Mesozoic amber, about 99 million years old,” explains University of Bern palaeontologist Adrienne Jochum.
They’re not just some weirdo extinct critters, either. Several land snails still living today also have fuzzy shells.
A modern-day hairy snail, Trichia hispida.
A team of researchers led by malacologist Jean-Michel Bichain from the Museum of Natural History and Ethnography in France named the newly discovered animal Archaeocyclotus brevivillosus – its species name combining the Latin words small (brevis) and shaggy (villōsus).
Out of eight species found in Myanmar amber, six have hairy shells, suggesting this may be the ancestral state of these land snails. In fact, this fuzz may have helped snails transition from a watery environment to life on land during the Mesozoic period 252 to 66 million years ago, the researchers suggest.
The hairs are formed from the outermost protein-filled layer of the snail’s shell – the shell’s skin – called the periostracum. Adding hairs to a shell would cost the tiny animals energy, so it must have given these minuscule prehistoric snails some sort of selective advantage in their tropical environment to make it worthwhile.
The edge of the snail shell is lined with tiny hairs.
Bichain and team speculate that these could have included water retention and protection against shell desiccation, allowing these animals to branch out into dryer soil niches. And just like our own mammalian hair, it’s possible the shell fuzz may have helped with thermoregulation.
“The bristles could also have served as camouflage or protected the snail against a direct attack by stalking birds or soil predators,” explains Jochum. “They may also have played a role in thermal regulation for the snail by allowing tiny water droplets to adhere to the shell, thereby serving as an ‘air conditioner’. And finally, it cannot be ruled out that the hairs provided an advantage in sexual selection.”
Archaeocyclotus brevivillosus.
As well as shaggy snails, Myanmar amber has conserved over two thousand unique species from delicate flowers to an exquisitely preserved feathered dinosaur tail, providing a stunning window into the biodiversity of the Cretaceous period.
Signs of ancient species from the tropics are hard to come by, given the warm, moist conditions are ideal for the disintegration and recycling of organic matter. So animals preserved in amber fill in some of these gaps in our fossil records, providing details on soft tissues and even the metallic colours of ancient insects, which would otherwise be lost to time.
One such specimen preserved what may be the first evidence of live births in land snails (rather than egg laying), with neonate snails still attached to their mother through mucus.
Sadly, while the amber does hold many precious exquisite specimens, trade in the fossils is currently funding devastating conflicts in Myanmar. In recognition of this awful problem, the researchers note the amber-encased snail specimen was collected legally in 2017 before the current conflicts resumed.
Rare 2,700-Year-Old Stone Carvings Discovered in Iraq
An Iraqi worker excavates a rock-carving relief recently found at the Mashki Gate, one of the monumental gates to the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, on the outskirts of what is today the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.
Archaeologists in Iraq have unearthed 2,700-year-old stone carvings that were chiselled into a previously undiscovered section of the Mashki Gate, an iconic structure in what was once the ancient Assyrian capital city of Nineveh.
The eight intricately carved marble bas-reliefs, which depict war scenes, grapevines, palm trees and other motifs, were found in what is now Mosul, during a project to restore the gate after Islamic State group militants destroyed it.
Experts believe that the decorative gate dates back to King Sennacherib, who ruled the Assyrian empire from 705 B.C. to 681 B.C., according to a statement from the Iraqi Council of Antiquities and Heritage.
During his reign, King Sennacherib moved the Assyrian capital to Nineveh where he became well known for his vast military campaigns, according to BBC News.
“We believe that these carvings were moved from the palace of Sennacherib and reused by the grandson of the king to renovate the gate of Mashki and to enlarge the guard room,” Fadel Mohammed Khodr, head of the Iraqi archaeological team, told Al Jazeera.
Because much of the gate was buried underground due to the way it was oriented during its original construction, the only portions that archaeologists could salvage were under the soil.
“Only the part buried underground has retained its carvings,” Khodr said.
In 2016, militants from IS (also called ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) destroyed the iconic gate with a bulldozer.
The Swiss-based International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas is working with Iraqi authorities as well as archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania and Mosul University on the restoration of the gate.
Drone photos reveal an early Mesopotamian city made of marsh islands
New remote-sensing studies at southern Iraq’s massive Tell al-Hiba site, shown here from the air, support an emerging view that an ancient city there largely consisted of four marsh islands.
A ground-penetrating eye in the sky has helped to rehydrate an ancient southern Mesopotamian city, tagging it as what amounted to a Venice of the Fertile Crescent. Identifying the watery nature of this early metropolis has important implications for how urban life flourished nearly 5,000 years ago between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where modern-day Iraq lies.
Remote-sensing data, mostly gathered by a specially equipped drone, indicate that a vast urban settlement called Lagash largely consisted of four marsh islands connected by waterways, says anthropological archaeologist Emily Hammer of the University of Pennsylvania. These findings add crucial details to an emerging view that southern Mesopotamian cities did not, as traditionally thought, expand outward from temple and administrative districts into irrigated farmlands that were encircled by a single city wall, Hammer reports in the December Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
“There could have been multiple evolving ways for Lagash to be a city of marsh islands as human occupation and environmental change reshaped the landscape,” Hammer says.
Because Lagash had no geographical or ritual center, each city sector developed distinctive economic practices on an individual marsh island, much like the later Italian city of Venice, she suspects. For instance, waterways or canals crisscrossed one marsh island, where fishing and collection of reeds for construction may have predominated.
Two other Lagash marsh islands display evidence of having been bordered by gated walls that enclosed carefully laid out city streets and areas with large kilns, suggesting these sectors were built in stages and may have been the first to be settled. Crop growing and activities such as pottery making may have occurred there.
Drone photographs of what were probably harbors on each marsh island suggest that boat travel connected city sectors. Remains of what may have been footbridges appear in and adjacent to waterways between marsh islands, a possibility that further excavations can explore.
Lagash, which formed the core of one of the world’s earliest states, was founded between about 4,900 and 4,600 years ago. Residents abandoned the site, now known as Tell al-Hiba, around 3,600 years ago, past digs show. It was first excavated more than 40 years ago.
Hidden city
Drone photos taken across a massive site in southern Iraq revealed that buried structures, shown in yellow, from the ancient Mesopotamian city of Lagash clustered in four sectors that had probably been marsh islands. Walls, shown in red, surrounded two large sectors. Now-dry waterways, shown in dark blue, connected sectors and crisscrossed one sector, far right.
Composite map of Lagash based on remote-sensing data
E. HAMMER/J. ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 2022
Previous analyses of the timing of ancient wetlands expansions in southern Iraq conducted by anthropological archaeologist Jennifer Pournelle of the University of South Carolina in Columbia indicated that Lagash and other southern Mesopotamian cities were built on raised mounds in marshes. Based on satellite images, archaeologist Elizabeth Stone of Stony Brook University in New York has proposed that Lagash consisted of around 33 marsh islands, many of them quite small.
Drone photos provided a more detailed look at Lagash’s buried structures than possible with satellite images, Hammer says. Guided by initial remote-sensing data gathered from ground level, a drone spent six weeks in 2019 taking high-resolution photographs of much of the site’s surface. Soil moisture and salt absorption from recent heavy rains helped the drone’s technology detect remnants of buildings, walls, streets, waterways and other city features buried near ground level.
Drone data enabled Hammer to narrow down densely inhabited parts of the ancient city to three islands, she says. A possibility exists that those islands were part of delta channels extending toward the Persian Gulf. A smaller, fourth island was dominated by a large temple.
Hammer’s drone probe of Lagash “confirms the idea of settled islands interconnected by watercourses,” says University of Chicago archaeologist Augusta McMahon, one of three co–field directors of ongoing excavations at the site.
Drone evidence of contrasting neighborhoods on different marsh islands, some looking planned and others more haphazardly arranged, reflect waves of immigration into Lagash between around 4,600 and 4,350 years ago, McMahon suggests. Excavated material indicates that new arrivals included residents of nearby and distant villages, mobile herders looking to settle down and slave laborers captured from neighboring city-states.
Dense clusters of residences and other buildings across much of Lagash suggest that tens of thousands of people lived there during its heyday, Hammer says. At that time, the city covered an estimated 4 to 6 square kilometers, nearly the area of Chicago.
It’s unclear whether northern Mesopotamian cities from around 6,000 years ago, which were not located in marshes, contained separate city sectors (SN: 2/5/08). But Lagash and other southern Mesopotamian cities likely exploited water transport and trade among closely spaced settlements, enabling unprecedented growth, says archaeologist Guillermo Algaze of the University of California, San Diego.
Lagash stands out as an early southern Mesopotamian city frozen in time, Hammer says. Nearby cities continued to be inhabited for a thousand years or more after Lagash’s abandonment, when the region had become less watery and sectors of longer-lasting cities had expanded and merged. At Lagash, “we have a rare opportunity to see what other ancient cities in the region looked like earlier in time,” Hammer says.
Graves of Elite Warrior and Aphrodite Cult Priestess Uncovered in Russia
A silver medallion was discovered in the grave of an Aphrodite priestess, showing the goddess and signs of the zodiac, minus Aquarius and Libra.
About 1,900 years ago, a woman died and was buried in Phanagoria – a city established centuries earlier on the coast of the Taman Peninsula in southern Russia. Her grave was together with others in the ancient city’s necropolis and while there was nothing particularly unusual about it, she was a priestess of the Aphrodite cult, the archaeologists excavating the ancient city concluded.
Another intriguing find at the Black Sea site was a warrior’s tomb featuring a sword that had been made in early medieval Iran. The woman’s grave was found by archaeologists Nikolay Sudarev and Mikhail Treister, during the 2022 summer season of the Phanagoria archaeological expedition, which has been supported since 2004 by the Oleg Deripaska Volnoe Delo Foundation, says its spokesman Ruben Bunyatyan.
Her adornments included a silver medallion showing the goddess and signs of the zodiac, minus Aquarius and Libra. Such medallions were common in the territory of the Bosporan Kingdom as early as 2,300 years ago, says Maria Chashuk, senior research associate of the Phanagoria archaeological expedition. No, the medallion, a big one – about 7 centimetres (2.75 inches) in diameter and 15 millimetres thick – was not broken, so it is puzzling why Aquarius and Libra are missing, she adds.
Rings and belt found by the priestess
Medallions of the sort were used in many ways: as brooches, as headgear accessories and as pendants, Chashuk explains. “It was found on the lower part of the woman’s chest. On the flip side, there is a brace through which one could put a cord and wear the medallion as a pendant. It looks like that was how the medallion was worn by the woman, but that question is still being studied.”
How did the researchers conclude that the ornament shows none other than Aphrodite? Sudarev and Treister based their decision on iconographic features of the image of the goddess, as well as similar images on other analogous findings in the region, Chashuk and Bunyatyan say.
“The images of the zodiac signs around the goddess also point to the fact that this is indeed Aphrodite Urania, as they emphasize her heavenly hypostasis,” Chashuk adds.
“Aphrodite Urania” refers to the divine aspect of the goddess as opposed to her earthly aspect “Aphrodite Pandemos,” not to mention the legend that she was sired by emissions from the genital package of Uranus that had been hacked off by his son Cronos. Moving on.
One of the grave goods was found in the tomb at Phanagoria, southern Russia.
The woman also wore silver earrings with pendants in the form of doves and rings that had images so poorly preserved that they can’t quite be made out: possibly images of cornucopia and Eros with wings, Chashuk suggests.
Other grave goods included a red clay jug with a twisted handle, iron scissors with a bronze handle, a bronze mirror, a string of 157 beads (somebody counted) and three bronze coins. The implication – that members of the ancient Greek pantheon were worshipped in first-century Taman – is not surprising. Christianity would only reach the region in the Middle Ages, around the ninth and 10th century, before which the people followed Slavic pagan religions – and before which some evidently adored the Hellenistic pantheon.
Some of the findings at Phanagoria.
The medallion also suggests belief in astrology, a pseudoscience that posits causative relationships between the positions of celestial bodies and events on Earth. Astrology goes back at least 4,000 years and has been suspected for at least much of that time. Cicero, for instance, wrote roughly 2,050 years ago that divination (by any means) would be awesome if it wasn’t hooey: “A really splendid and helpful thing it is – if only such a faculty exists,” he wrote in “Defense Divinatione.” He added that all men believe “signs are given of future events” – which applies, more or less, to this day.
While Cicero wrote arguments (at remarkable length) for and against astrology’s merits, centuries before him Xenophanes, born in the sixth century B.C.E., reportedly took an actual stand against trying to peer into the future through omens and portents – if only because the gods can’t be bothered to communicate with us, lowly humans.
So, a woman died in first-century Phanagoria and was buried with a medallion showing Aphrodite and 10 signs of the zodiac, and some goods for the afterlife. But maybe she was a groupie of the goddess – why think she was a priestess?
The site is at Phanagoria in southern Russia, by the Black Sea.
Sudarev, an archaeologist with the Russian Academy of Sciences, believes that some of the items from the burial have specific semantic meanings, Chashuk says. “For example, silver earrings with pendants in the form of doves could be associated with different deities, but most often doves are mentioned as a symbol of Aphrodite Urania. The mirror and scissors often had a ritual meaning (as a tool for trimming hair) and could also be one of the symbols of the goddess.”
The excavators also found two scarab-type beads made of Egyptian faience, found with other beads on her neck, but they bear highlighting because they bore hieroglyphs at the bottom: one showing a sitting cat-raptor and the other a cobra-Uraeus with a solar disk.
“Mr. Sudarev notes that the symbols on the scarabs relate to the Egyptian analogues of Aphrodite Urania – Wadjet [the cobra goddess] and Hathor,” Chashuk sums up.
At the end of the day, the presence of Aphrodite worship and, possibly, the burial of a priestess to her cult support the belief that Phanagoria was founded as a Greek colony on the Taman Peninsula, the archaeologists say.
Grave with Sassanian sword
Signs of Sassanians
While the existence of deities and their amiable propensity to share information is dubious, and if anybody had consistently gotten their forecasts right, we would probably have heard about it – there is no similar dubiety about the existence of war. The discovery of the Sassanian sword in a burial in Phanagoria, from about 1,500 years ago, is more information about practical matters. “Archaeologists believe that the weapon is part of the Iranian group of swords due to the distinctive golden top of its wooden hilt,” explains Bunyatyan.
Finding a fine sword of Iranian (Sassanian) origin in the territory of the Kingdom of the Cimmerian Bosporus supports historic sources describing the Sassanid Empire’s political and military influence in the Caucasus region and along the Taman Peninsula, says Alexey Voroshilov, head of the Phanagorian expedition’s necropolis team. It could have been a diplomatic gift.
Buried with a precious sword
Or, might it reveal the use of mercenaries, foreign soldiers fighting for filthy lucre, which was apparently not unknown in Classic times? It seems that even the “Greek army” that combated the “Carthaginian forces” were stuffed to the gills with hired help.
Not likely, because the sword was just too good, says Voroshilov. “Expensive prestigious weapons were either made to order or came as war trophies. The ceremonial arms and horse harness were part of the diplomatic gifts,” he says. “Hence, it is highly unlikely that the owner of the sword was a mercenary. There is no doubt that this person was a representative of the elite of Phanagoria and was a bearer of the military aristocratic culture of the Bosporan Kingdom in the Migration Period.”
It’s the only sword of its kind to be found in Phanagoria, he says, adding that “this is the first major discovery in Phanagoria testifying to cultural ties between the elites of Phanagoria and the Sassanid Empire.”
The warrior was also buried with other fine stuffs. “In the tomb itself, a lot of rare things were discovered, including imported items: glass jugs, wooden and metal utensils, and wooden boxes with decayed cloths. The tomb is notable for its monumentality and considerable depth (about 7 meters), as well as for its opulent burial rites. There is a lot to suggest that noble and wealthy city dwellers were buried in the crypt along with the warrior,” Voroshilov sums up. The priestess seems to have gotten relatively short shrift a few centuries earlier.
DNA Analysis Identifies Neanderthal Family Members
The first snapshot of a Neanderthal community has been pieced together by scientists who examined ancient DNA from fragments of bone and teeth unearthed in caves in southern Siberia.
The remains were found in caves in southern Siberia.
Researchers analysed DNA from 13 Neanderthal men, women and children and found an interconnecting web of relationships, including a father and his teenage daughter, another man related to the father, and two second-degree relatives, possibly an aunt and her nephew.
All of the Neanderthals were heavily inbred, a consequence, the researchers believe, of the Neanderthals’ small population size, with communities scattered over vast distances and numbering only about 10 to 30 individuals.
Laurits Skov, the first author on the study at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, said the fact that the Neanderthals were alive at the same time was “very exciting” and implied that they belonged to a single social community.
Neanderthal remains have been recovered from numerous caves across western Eurasia – territory the heavy-browed humans occupied from about 430,000 years ago until they became extinct 40,000 years ago. It has previously been impossible to tell whether Neanderthals found at particular sites belonged to communities or not.
“Neanderthal remains in general, and remains with preserved DNA in particular, are extremely rare,” said Benjamin Peter, a senior author on the study in Leipzig. “We tend to get single individuals from sites often thousands of kilometres, and tens of thousands of years apart.”
In the latest work, researchers including Svante Pääbo, who won this year’s Nobel prize in medicine for breakthrough studies on ancient genomes, examined DNA from the remains of Neanderthals found in the Chagyrskaya cave and nearby Okladnikov cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia.
Neanderthals sheltered in the caves about 54,000 years ago, seeking cover to feast on the ibex, horse and bison they hunted as the animals migrated along the river valleys the caves overlook. Beyond Neanderthal and animal bones, tens of thousands of stone tools were also found.
Writing in the journal Nature, the scientists describe how the ancient DNA points to the Neanderthals living at the same time, with some being members of the same family.
Further analysis revealed more genetic diversity in Neanderthal mitochondria – the tiny battery-like structures found inside cells which are only passed down the maternal line – than in their Y chromosomes, which are passed down from father to son.
The most likely explanation, the researchers say, is that female Neanderthals travelled from their home communities to live with male partners. Whether force was involved is not a question DNA can answer, however.
“Personally, I don’t think there is particularly good evidence that Neanderthals were much different from early modern humans that lived at the same time,” said Peter.
“We find that the community we study was likely very small, perhaps 10 to 20 individuals and that the wider Neanderthal populations in the Altai mountains were quite sparse,” Peter said. “Nevertheless, they managed to persevere in a rough environment for hundreds of thousands of years, which I think deserves great respect.”
Dr Lara Cassidy, an assistant professor in genetics at Trinity College Dublin, called the study a “milestone” as “the first genomic snapshot of a Neanderthal community”.
“Understanding how their societies were organised is important for so many reasons,” Cassidy said. “It humanises these people and gives rich context to their lives. But also, down the line if we have more studies like this, it may also reveal unique aspects of the social organisation of our own Homo sapiens ancestors. This is crucial to understanding why we are here today and Neanderthals are not.”
