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An early modern human from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor
- Qiaomei Fu1,2,3 na1,
- Mateja Hajdinjak3 na1,
- Oana Teodora Moldovan4,
- Silviu Constantin5,
- Swapan Mallick2,6,7,
- Pontus Skoglund2,
- Nick Patterson6,
- Nadin Rohland2,
- Iosif Lazaridis2,
- Birgit Nickel3,
- Bence Viola3,7,8,
- Kay Prüfer3,
- Matthias Meyer3,
- Janet Kelso3,
- David Reich2,6,9 &
- …
- Svante Pääbo3
Naturevolume 524, pages216–219 (2015)Cite this article
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Abstract
Neanderthals are thought to have disappeared in Europe approximately 39,000–41,000 years ago but they have contributed 1–3% of the DNA of present-day people in Eurasia1. Here we analyse DNA from a 37,000–42,000-year-old2 modern human from Peştera cu Oase, Romania. Although the specimen contains small amounts of human DNA, we use an enrichment strategy to isolate sites that are informative about its relationship to Neanderthals and present-day humans. We find that on the order of 6–9% of the genome of the Oase individual is derived from Neanderthals, more than any other modern human sequenced to date. Three chromosomal segments of Neanderthal ancestry are over 50 centimorgans in size, indicating that this individual had a Neanderthal ancestor as recently as four to six generations back. However, the Oase individual does not share more alleles with later Europeans than with East Asians, suggesting that the Oase population did not contribute substantially to later humans in Europe.
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Acknowledgements
We thank E. Trinkaus for facilitating the sampling of Oase 1, J. Krause for help with sampling and initial DNA analyses, A. Aximu for help with DNA hybridization captures and library preparation, and E. Trinkaus and L. Vigilant for critical reading of the manuscript. Q.F. is funded in part by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA05130202) and the Special Foundation of the President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2015-2016). O.T.M. and S.C. are supported by the Romanian National Research Council through project PCCE 31/2010 (Karst Climate Archives). D.R. is supported by US National Science Foundation HOMINID grant BCS-1032255, US National Institutes of Health grant GM100233, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The laboratory work was funded by the Presidential Innovation Fund of the Max Planck Society.
Author information
Qiaomei Fu and Mateja Hajdinjak: These authors contributed equally to this work.
Authors and Affiliations
Key Laboratory of Vertebrate Evolution and Human Origins of Chinese Academy of Sciences, IVPP, CAS, Beijing, 100044, China
Qiaomei Fu
Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, Boston, 02115, Massachusetts, USA
Qiaomei Fu, Swapan Mallick, Pontus Skoglund, Nadin Rohland, Iosif Lazaridis & David Reich
Department of Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, 04103, Germany
Qiaomei Fu, Mateja Hajdinjak, Birgit Nickel, Bence Viola, Kay Prüfer, Matthias Meyer, Janet Kelso & Svante Pääbo
“Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology, Cluj Branch, Cluj, 400006, Romania
Oana Teodora Moldovan
Department of Geospeleology and Paleontology, “Emil Racoviţă” Institute of Speleology, Bucharest 12, 010986, Romania
Silviu Constantin
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, 02142, Massachusetts, USA
Swapan Mallick, Nick Patterson & David Reich
Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, 04103, Germany
Swapan Mallick & Bence Viola
Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto, Toronto, M5S 2S2, Ontario, Canada
Bence Viola
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, 02115, Massachusetts, USA
David Reich
- Qiaomei Fu
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- Mateja Hajdinjak
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- Oana Teodora Moldovan
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- Silviu Constantin
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- Swapan Mallick
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- Pontus Skoglund
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- Nick Patterson
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- Nadin Rohland
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- Iosif Lazaridis
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- Birgit Nickel
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- Bence Viola
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- Kay Prüfer
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- Matthias Meyer
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- Janet Kelso
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- David Reich
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- Svante Pääbo
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Contributions
N.P., K.P., M.M., J.K., D.R. and S.P. supervised the study. S.C. and O.T.M. collected and analysed archaeological material. Q.F., M.H. and B.N. performed laboratory work. Q.F., M.H., S.M., P.S., N.P., N.R., I.L., B.V., K.P., J.K. and D.R. analysed data. Q.F., S.M., M.M. and D.R. designed capture probes. D.R. and S.P. wrote the manuscript with the help of all co-authors.
Corresponding authors
Correspondence toDavid Reich orSvante Pääbo.
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The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Extended data figures and tables
Extended Data Figure 1 Mitochondrial DNA tree for Oase 1 and other modern humans.
The consensus sequences for all Oase 1 fragments and for deaminated fragments are shown. The tree is rooted with a Neanderthal mtDNA (Vindija33.25).
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Fu, Q., Hajdinjak, M., Moldovan, O.et al. An early modern human from Romania with a recent Neanderthal ancestor.Nature524, 216–219 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14558
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