Initial Upper Palaeolithic humans in Europe had recent Neanderthal ancestry

Abstract

Modern humans appeared in Europe by at least 45,000 years ago1–5, but the extent of their interactions with Neanderthals, who disappeared by about 40,000 years ago6, and their relationship to the broader expansion of modern humans outside of Africa are poorly understood. We present genome-wide data from three individuals dated to between 45,930 and 42,580 years ago from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria1,2. They are the earliest Late Pleistocene modern humans that have been recovered in Europe thus far, and were found associated with an Initial Upper Palaeolithic artefact assemblage. Unlike two previously studied individuals of similar ages from Romania7 and Siberia8 that did not contribute detectably to later populations, these individuals are more closely related to present-day and ancient populations in East Asia and the Americas than to later west Eurasians. This indicates that they belonged to a modern human migration into Europe that was not previously known from the genetic record, and provides evidence that there was at least some continuity between the earliest modern humans in Europe and later people in Eurasia. Moreover, we find that all three individuals had Neanderthal ancestors a few generations back in their family history, confirming that the first European modern humans mixed with Neanderthals and suggesting that such mixing could have been common.