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It was a comfortable time for the Neanderthals.

For several hundreds of thousands of years in the Stone Age in Europe and in the northern regions of Asia they did not know competition from other human species.

But that ended more than 45,000 years ago: At that time, modern people migrated north from Africa, and the Neanderthals disappeared forever around 39,000 years ago.

In the meantime, however, there was ample time for encounters between the two lines of people.

Svante Pääbo, Janet Kelso and Mateja Hajdinjak from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (EVA) in Leipzig, together with a large team of specialists, are now reporting in "Nature" on the traces that such meetings have left on the genome of collectors and hunters who lived in a cave in what is now Bulgaria 45,000 years ago.

Several groups of Homo sapiens reached Europe, but not all of them became permanently established.

Some lines of the newcomers at that time have long since disappeared from Europe, Asia and America.

The EVA researchers Kay Prüfer and Johannes Krause conclude with colleagues in the journal "Nature Ecology and Evolution" from the remains of a woman that Czech scientists excavated in a cave in Zlatý kůň in 1950.

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The translation of “Zlatý kůň” means “golden horse” and goes back to an old legend, according to which a greedy lady of the castle wanted to snatch a treasure hidden in the mountain.

As a punishment, a ghost transforms the woman and her horse into a golden statue, after which the Zlatý kůň mountain is still named today.

As early as the 1950s, archaeologists found the remains of a woman in the stalactite cave under the mountain, from whose skull the researchers were now able to isolate the genetic material.

Radiocarbon dating showed the bones to be only 15,000 years old - it was clear to everyone that the bones must be at least twice as old.

Finally, significant damage was seen on the left side of the frontal bone, where a cave hyena could have bitten.

However, these powerful predators became extinct 24,000 years ago.

The shape of the skull also indicated that the woman must have lived more than 21,000 years ago.

Solving the age puzzle was not easy.

New radiocarbon dates showed an age of 27,000 years and another time of 19,000 years.

The discovery of bovine DNA in the samples finally led to the realization: Apparently the discoverers of the skull in 1950 had stabilized their find with bone glue, as was common in the past.

This had penetrated the fragments of the bones well and the researchers measured a mixture of young bone glue and the ancient bones from the Stone Age for each sample.

The researchers had no chance of using radiocarbon dating to determine the correct age of the skull.

All the greater was the hope of determining the age of the Stone Age woman using ancient DNA.

The researchers isolated human DNA from 15 milligrams of bone meal from the temporal bone.

Immigrated and disappeared again without a trace

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The woman was clearly a modern person and not a Neanderthal.

Their genetic makeup is also similar to that of the people who set out from Africa 50,000 or 60,000 years ago and who later met the Neanderthals in Europe and northern Asia.

Only the EVA researchers found no evidence of any closer relationship with the people who live in Europe, Asia or America today.

“Obviously, this woman's line has disappeared,” says Kay Prüfer.

But there are Neanderthal traces in the genome of the woman from the golden horse: Around three percent of the sequences originally came from Neanderthals.

This is by no means unusual, the Europeans of the 21st century also carry comparable amounts of Neanderthals.

In the opinion of the EVA researchers, modern humans coming from Africa could have met Neanderthals in the region we now know as the “Middle East”.

From one or the other intimate relationship between the two human lines, perhaps 50,000 years ago, the Neanderthal genes could then come from, which not only the Stone Age woman but also most people of our time have in them.

Homo sapiens colonized Europe much earlier than expected

Scientists have examined and virtually reconstructed the skull of a Homo Sapiens.

The result is a small sensation: the find is more than 150,000 years older than the oldest skull ever found in Europe.

Source: WORLD / Sebastian Struwe

Kay Prüfer found an important difference in these Neanderthal sprinkles: Normally, the genes of both parents mix in their children, and the blocks with the Neanderthal genome tend to get a little shorter in each generation.

The specks in the genome of the woman from Zlatý kůň are a little longer than in the genome of a Stone Age man whose thighbone was found by a mammoth ivory carver in 2008 near the present-day town of Ust'-Ishim on the banks of the Irtysh in western Siberia.

This Stone Age man lived around 45,000 years ago, and Kay Prüfer estimates that his ancestors could have acquired their Neanderthal genome around 85 to 100 generations earlier in the Middle East.

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In the case of the woman from the golden horse, however, the larger Neanderthal sprinkles indicate that the same intermingling should have taken place only 60 to 80 generations earlier.

But with that the Stone Age woman should be a few hundred years older than the Stone Age man from Siberia.

This could even result in differences of a few thousand years if a suspicion is confirmed that the ancestors of the man of Ust'-Ishim could have engaged with people of this lineage one more time after the Neanderthal liaison in the Middle East.

The oldest traces of Homo sapiens in Europe and Asia

But that would make the Czech Stone Age woman the oldest modern person to be found in Europe and Asia.

Her line, like that of the Stone Age man of Ust'-Ishim, has since disappeared from Europe, Asia and America.

The very distant relatives of the three Stone Age men, who also lived around 45,000 years ago in the Bacho-Kiro Cave on the northern foothills of the over 2000 meter high Balkan Mountains in the north of today's Bulgaria, on the other hand, have according to the genetic make-up analyzes of Teams around the EVA researchers Svante Pääbo, Janet Kelso and Mateja Hajdinjak survived to this day.

“Not in Europe or Siberia, but in Southeast Asia,” explains Mateja Hajdinjak.

The EVA researchers also found the genetic material of Neanderthals in the genetic material of these three men - and a surprising finding: one of the ancestors of one of the three men in the Bacho-Kiro cave must have been less than six generations ago and thus perhaps only a hundred years before his birth Have been Neanderthals.

And for the other two men, their Neanderthal ancestors were only about seven generations back.

The EVA researchers found a similar picture in the genetic material of a lower jaw, which colleagues had found in the Peştera cu oasis karst caves in southwest Romania.

This modern person lived at least 40,000 years ago, but possibly also much earlier.

And one of this man's direct ancestors had been a Neanderthal four or six generations earlier.

However, this line is also extinct today.

Neanderthals were a lot smarter than expected

The fact that Neanderthals were once ousted by the wiser Homo sapiens persists.

But elevation paintings in Spain show that our ancestors were very capable of abstract thinking or art.

Source: WELT / Thomas Laeber

From this, the researchers conclude that a number of different groups of modern humans came from Africa to Neanderthal Europe and that intimate relationships between the two human lines were quite common.

Many of these groups, such as the wife of Zlatý kůň, the men of Ust'-Ishim and from the Peştera cu oasis caves, however, disappeared again, while close relatives of the Bacho-Kiro cave line still live in East Asia and America.

“So there seemed to be a lot going on in Europe at the time,” says Kay Prüfer.

But why did not only several lines of modern man disappear later, but also the Neanderthals?

Kay Prüfer and his colleagues have a theory: about 39,000 years ago a super volcano erupted in the Bay of Naples, which not only directly killed most of the life in a wide area, but also the temperatures in large parts of Europe drop by several degrees for a few years let.

Not only the Neanderthals but also many lines of modern humans in Europe could have fallen victim to this climate shock.