Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
One illustration depicts the first Europeans who lived in what is now Ranis, Germany, about 45,000 years ago.
Discovery reinforces the idea that human expansion outside Africa was not a linear path, but a succession of movements, encounters and evolutionary lines that failed, like this obscure lineage of Homo sapiens.
Ancient human genomes, recovered from fossil remains in Germany and the Czech Republic, are showing researchers a lineage of Homo sapiens that lived in Europe during the Ice Age, which ended up disappearing without leaving genetic descendants in current populations.
According to researchers, the oldest DNA data from modern humans so far obtained in European territory dates back to around 45,000 years ago and belongs to a group associated with the culture Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician (LRJ).
In excavations in the Ranis cave, in Germanyarchaeologists collected bone fragments attributed to six individuals, including a mother, her daughter and more distant relatives. The sequences were carried out by a team linked to the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, according to .
Approximately 230 kilometers away, in Czech Republicanother finding reinforces the idea of a small, scattered but related population: DNA extracted from a woman’s skull found in Zlatý kůň reveals genetic affinities with individuals from Ranis: they could have met.
The analysis points to a scenario of small population numbers, possibly in the order of hundreds of people, traveling through a Europe of cold and hostile tundra, with signs of low genetic diversity, interpreted as insulation.
The researchers also emphasize that these humans did not present variants associated with light skin common in modern Europeans, maintaining darker pigmentationconsistent with a recent African origin.
Genomes also provide clues about . The LRJ individuals display long segments of Neanderthal DNA, which suggests that mixing between the two populations occurred relatively recently — between 1,000 and 2,500 years before these individuals’ lifetimes, placing the interbreeding episode around 46 thousand years ago. In the text, recent studies are mentioned that point to prolonged periods and possibly multiple waves of interbreeding.
Despite this Neanderthal heritage, the LRJ lineage appears to have been a short-range branch: it survived for dozens of generations in the middle of the Ice Age, but became extinct without contributing genetically to later populations. The discovery reinforces the idea that human expansion outside Africa was not a linear path, but a succession of movements, encounters and also evolutionary lines that failed.
