The first Neanderthal family portrait from DNA

A

and two relatives, possibly a

and

, who lived

in southern Siberia, in a group

: this is the

ever obtained .

and the result of

, thanks to the technique developed by Svante Paabo, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine 2022. Paabo is one of the authors of the discovery, coordinated by his laboratory, at the German Institute of Evolutionary Genetics Max Planck Leipzig and published in the journal Nature.

Italy also contributed to the study, with the University of Bologna.

The reconstruction of an entire Neanderthal family is the result of the

ever done on these ancient cousins ​​of ours, of whose social organization we still know very little.

So far, despite the great improvements in genetic analysis techniques, it had been possible to study the DNA of just 18 individuals.

The step forward that led to the research published in Nature was made possible thanks to the remains discovered in southern Siberia, in

, in two caves called

and

.

Here the research team led by Laurits Skov succeeded in extracting

from the remains :

, including

, who lived between 51,000 and 59,000 years ago.

It's a very important set of data, "but what makes this work extraordinary - commented population genetics expert Lara Cassidy of Trinity College Dublin - is that the sequenced individuals are not scattered, but

, thus providing the

".

Four of these individuals were in fact closely related to each other, a father with a teenage daughter and a couple of second degree relatives, probably an aunt and a cousin.

"The fact that they were living at the same time is very exciting," Skov noted.

"This means they

and,

," he added.

By comparing the common parts and the differences in genetic sequences, both nuclear and mitochondrial, the researchers not only identified some kinships but were able to reconstruct some possible social relationships.

The data suggests that Neanderthals lived in

, with a certain mobility and exchange of people between the various neighboring groups.

Probably, genetic data suggest, to move more between groups were women, who more easily abandoned the original group and moved to other communities, while males were more permanent.

The discovery is a further confirmation of the importance of the genetic techniques developed by Paabo in the study of paleoanthropology and which in recent decades have allowed to revolutionize the knowledge about our ancestors.