The four-story labyrinth of galleries in Bulgaria's Bacho Kiro cave has long been a magnet for all sorts of humans. Neanderthals came first, more than 50,000 years ago, and left their characteristic Mousterian stone tools among the stalagmites. Next came modern humans in at least two waves; the first littered the cave floor with beads and stone blades stained with ochre, about 45,000 years ago. Another group settled in about 36,000 years ago with even more sophisticated artifacts.
However, another study out today, of what may be the oldest modern human in Europe, shows the first wave of moderns had diverse Neanderthal legacies. The genome of a dark-skinned, brown-haired, brown-eyed woman from Zlatý kůň cave in the Czech Republic included only 3% Neanderthal DNA, which likely came from a long-ago tryst in the Middle East, not from recent contact, the study suggests.
The new revelations fill out the story of these ancient encounters, says Mateja Hajdinjak, a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and an author of the Bacho Kiro study."For the first time, we're getting ancient DNA from multiple early modern humans that tells us so much about their interactions with some of the very last Neanderthals in Europe," she says.
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