In the mid-1990s, a paleontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga of-the Madrid Complutense University, and his team conducted excavations in Spain, in the Sierra de Atapuerca. In a place called “The crack of bones» (Sima de los Huesos) they found thousands of bones and teeth, which are decided researchers belonged to members of the species Homo heidelbergensis (Heidelberg man), who lived in Europe, Africa and Asia from 600 to 250 thousands of years ago. Many scholars have suggested that it was Homo erectus was the ancestor of Neanderthals and perhaps modern people.
In 2013, problems arose with the identification found in the cave remains, because the analysis of their mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has shown that it is not like a Neanderthal mtDNA: similarities were found with the mtDNA of another kind – denisovan.
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At the same time, paleontologists from the Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology Society Max Planck in Germany decided not to sequence the mitochondrial DNA and nuclear, to unravel the mystery.
After two years of work paleogenetics Mattyasu Meyer (Matthias Meyer) was able to determine the sequence of nuclear DNA fragments of teeth and bone legs. He and his colleagues could not be fully sequenced genomes, because the ancient DNA disintegrated into fragments of 25-40 bp. Despite this, the researchers were informed about 1-2 million pairs of bases of basic nuclear DNA.
They spent scanning the DNA in search of unique markers and found that the remains contain more Neanderthal alleles than Denisovsky or modern people.
The data allowed the scientists to conclude that Neanderthals separated from other members of Homo much earlier than had been assumed. Paleogenetics Mattyas Meyer also said that the way the ancestors of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals diverged about 550-765 thousand years ago, that is, 100-400 million years earlier than scientists expected, and therefore, it is necessary to review all the ideas about human evolution.
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