• PNAS Android App Free
  • Sign up for PNAS eTOC alerts

Evidence for a genetic discontinuity between Neandertals and 24,000-year-old anatomically modern Europeans

  1. Giorgio Bertorelle§‡‡
  1. †Dipartimento di Biologia Animale e Genetica, Università di Firenze, Via del Proconsolo 12, 50122 Florence, Italy
  2. ‡Departament de Biologia Animal, Universitat de Barcelona, Avenida Diagonal 645, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
  3. §Dipartimento di Biologia, Università di Ferrara, via Borsari 46, 44100 Ferrara, Italy
  4. Dipartimento di Chimica Generale e Inorganica, Chimica Analitica, Chimica Fisica, Università di Parma, Parco Area delle Scienze 17/A, 43100 Parma, Italy
  5. ∥Dipartimento di Scienze Archeologiche, Università di Pisa, via Galvani 1, 56100 Pisa, Italy
  6. ††Facultat de Ciències de la Salut i de la Vida, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Doctor Aiguader 80, 08003 Barcelona, Spain

  1. Edited by Henry C. Harpending, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, and approved March 27, 2003 (received for review January 20, 2003)

Abstract

During the late Pleistocene, early anatomically modern humans coexisted in Europe with the anatomically archaic Neandertals for some thousand years. Under the recent variants of the multiregional model of human evolution, modern and archaic forms were different but related populations within a single evolving species, and both have contributed to the gene pool of current humans. Conversely, the Out-of-Africa model considers the transition between Neandertals and anatomically modern humans as the result of a demographic replacement, and hence it predicts a genetic discontinuity between them. Following the most stringent current standards for validation of ancient DNA sequences, we typed the mtDNA hypervariable region I of two anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens individuals of the Cro-Magnon type dated at about 23 and 25 thousand years ago. Here we show that the mtDNAs of these individuals fall well within the range of variation of today's humans, but differ sharply from the available sequences of the chronologically closer Neandertals. This discontinuity is difficult to reconcile with the hypothesis that both Neandertals and early anatomically modern humans contributed to the current European gene pool.

Footnotes

    • ↵‡‡ To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: ggb{at}unife.it.

    • This paper was submitted directly (Track II) to the PNAS office.

    • Abbreviations: a.m.h., anatomically modern human(s); HVRI, hypervariable region I; MDS, multidimensional scaling.

    • Data deposition: The sequences reported in this paper have been deposited in the GenBank database (accession nos. AY283027 and AY283028).

    • Received January 20, 2003.

    Online Impact