Europe's Ancestors: Cro-Magnon 28,000 Years Old Had DNA Like Modern Humans
Tibia
fragment. DNA was extracted from this fragment and from skull splinters,
and all extracts yielded the same HVR I sequence. (Credit: David
Caramelli et al. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002700.g001)
July 16, 2008 — Some 40,000
years ago, Cro-Magnons -- the first people who had a skeleton that
looked anatomically modern -- entered Europe, coming from Africa. A
group of geneticists, coordinated by Guido Barbujani and David Caramelli
of the Universities of Ferrara and Florence, shows that a Cro-Magnoid
individual who lived in Southern Italy 28,000 years ago was a modern
European, genetically as well as anatomically.
The Cro-Magnoid people long coexisted in Europe with other humans,
the Neandertals, whose anatomy and DNA were clearly different from ours.
However, obtaining a reliable sequence of Cro-Magnoid DNA was
technically challenging.
"The risk in the study of ancient individuals is to attribute to the
fossil specimen the DNA left there by archaeologists or biologists who
manipulated it," Barbujani says. "To avoid that, we followed all phases
of the retrieval of the fossil bones and typed the DNA sequences of all
people who had any contacts with them."
The researchers wrote in the newly published paper: "The Paglicci 23
individual carried a mtDNA sequence that is still common in Europe, and
which radically differs from those of the almost contemporary
Neandertals, demonstrating a genealogical continuity across 28,000
years, from Cro-Magnoid to modern Europeans."
The results demonstrate for the first time that the anatomical
differences between Neandertals and Cro-Magnoids were associated with
clear genetic differences. The Neandertal people, who lived in Europe
for nearly 300,000 years, are not the ancestors of modern Europeans.
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