What A 45,000 Year-Old Bone Reveals About Human-Neanderthal Relations

Published November 7, 2014
Updated February 1, 2018

The Human Journey

Before Ust’-Ishim man, the oldest human genome to have been mapped belonged to a 24,000-year-old boy, whose bones were also discovered in Siberia. The DNA from Mal’ta boy, as he is called, demonstrated an ancestral link between Europeans and Native Americans.

Like the Mal’ta boy, Ust’-Ishim man helps us more fully retell the story of the nomads of our species who left Africa and migrated across the globe. The full details remain clouded, but the outlines of a narrative are there.

It appears that about 60,000 years ago a wave of Homo sapiens traveled from the Horn of Africa into the Middle East. Some continued northward to Siberia. Eventually some of our species spread west to Europe as well as east, likely along the coast of the Indian Ocean, all the way to Indonesia and Australia. Later, sometime between 40,000 and 15,000 years ago, others crossed an ice-bridge from Asia to Alaska and began populating the Americas.

Ust’Ishim man offers the title, if not all of the details, of another chapter in this story. At some point between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago, Homo sapiens encountered and mated with Neanderthals. Millennia later, the Neanderthal line would mysteriously fizzle out. But Homo sapiens, many of us still carrying the DNA traces from our species’ dalliance with Neanderthals, would continue to flourish and populate the earth.

author
John
author
John has been writing for All That Is Interesting since 2014 and now lives in Madrid, Spain, where he writes and consults on international development projects in East Africa.
editor
Savannah Cox
editor
Savannah Cox holds a Master's in International Affairs from The New School as well as a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and now serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of Sheffield. Her work as a writer has also appeared on DNAinfo.