Jægere-samlere lever i komplekse sociale netværk for at undgå indavl. Forskere undersøgte 34.000 år gamle genomer fra Sunghir og fandt, at disse mennesker også havde begrænset slægtskab og lav indavl. Det tyder på, at deres sociale organisation lignede nutidige jægere-samleres, hvor små grupper var en del af større parringsnetværk.
Titel på undersøgelse:
Ancient genomes show social and reproductive behavior of early Upper Paleolithic foragers.
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Hele abstrakt på originalsprog:
Present-day hunter-gatherers (HGs) live in multilevel social groups essential to sustain a population structure characterized by limited levels of within-band relatedness and inbreeding. When these wider social networks evolved among HGs is unknown. To investigate whether the contemporary HG strategy was already present in the Upper Paleolithic, we used complete genome sequences from Sunghir, a site dated to ~34,000 years before the present, containing multiple anatomically modern human individuals. We show that individuals at Sunghir derive from a population of small effective size, with limited kinship and levels of inbreeding similar to HG populations. Our findings suggest that Upper Paleolithic social organization was similar to that of living HGs, with limited relatedness within residential groups embedded in a larger mating network.