Neanderthals trekked all the way into Siberia
Neanderthals, the stocky kin of modern humans, were far more widespread geographically than previously thought, with some trekking into southern Siberia before vanishing about 30,000 years ago, scientists said on Monday.
Researchers led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, found that Neanderthals spread 1,250 miles further east than scientists had commonly believed.
The scientists used genetic tests to determine that three fragmentary bones previously found in the Altai region of southern Siberia were indeed those of a Neanderthal. They also confirmed that a child’s skeletal remains from Teshik-Tash in the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan were from a Neanderthal.
Scientists previously had established that Neanderthals lived in Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia before their disappearance, perhaps after some type of competition with modern humans who had migrated out of Africa.
“Intriguingly, their presence in southern Siberia raises the possibility that they may have been present even farther to the east, in Mongolia and China,” the researchers wrote in the journal Nature.
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