Siberian Town Stakes a Claim as Humanity’s Cradle

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/world/europe/siberian-town-stakes-a-claim-as-humanitys-cradle.html

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SOLONESHNOYE, Russia — Wood smoke hangs like a mist over this town, nestled in a valley deep in Siberia. The log houses lean at jaunty angles, dogs bark in the yards and cows, their neck bells clanging, walk the dusty streets.

At once picturesque and poor, Soloneshnoye, like so much of rural Russia, was passed over by the oil boom and bust of faraway Moscow.

But for all its woes, the town may have found its ticket in another form of fossil fuel: human prehistory, linked to discoveries of ancient bones in the area.

In an emerging model of evolution, widely supported by scientists, different types of early humans, including Neanderthals, interbred and left their genetic traces with many of us today. It is a theory known in the scientific literature as “admixture between archaic and anatomically modern humans.”

Piece by piece — a finger bone here, a toe there — the nearby Denisova cave has been yielding clues central to this scientific narrative. It has given rise to hopes for a tourism industry and scientific conferences here that could give the town’s fortunes a boost.

“Every year, we find something interesting,” said Aleksandr S. Voronov, the mayor. Just this summer, the cave produced a new find: the world’s oldest known needle. “The more we find, the more interesting it becomes,” he said.

The discoveries encapsulate what scientists say makes this place unique: It is the only spot on earth where bones of three types of early humans, Neanderthal, Denisovan and homo sapiens, have all been discovered, though they did not necessarily live here at the same time.

The area has a long way to go before it can give the Lascaux cave in southern France a run for its money. So far, the town has opened a paleoanthropology wing at the local museum, and the regional government plans to pave the road to the Denisova cave.

Along the route, a cave man-themed roadside attraction has popped up. Called the “Cradle of Humanity,” it shows various types of cave dwellers — hairy, bucktoothed and wide-eyed — with information on their transformation from apelike to more recognizably human. The display captures the strange overlap in evolution that allowed interbreeding.

A guest lodge for visitors and scientists has opened near the cave. A few miles away, another lodge doubles as a retreat for soaking in a tub of a traditional Mongolian medicinal bath, in water with fermented deer antlers. A third lodge is under construction.

In the summer months, vacationers come by the busload from around Russia. Recently, some Dutch tourists arrived in a camper van.

The 50,000-year-old needle found this summer was an intriguing example of human ingenuity. But that is not the Denisova cave’s main draw.

The cave — at 2,900 square feet, about the size of a home in the American suburbs — has become a center of study into ancient hominid interbreeding.

The most complete Neanderthal genome decoded to date came from a toe bone found here. And the bones of a new type of early human, the Denisovans, have so far only been found in, and named after, this cave.

The genome from the finger bone of a female child sequenced in 2010 revealed that Denisovans mated with modern humans, though not necessarily in this spot. Modern Melanesians and Australian Aboriginals carry small percentages of the Denisovan genome.

All modern humans of non-African ancestry carry 1 percent to 2 percent Neanderthal genes. Though likely the result of encounters in the Middle East or elsewhere, the genome from the toe bone found in the Denisova cave brought this breeding into sharper focus.

“It’s an extremely important site,” Svante Paabo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who sequenced the Denisovan genome, said in a telephone interview.

“One lesson is that human groups have always met and mixed with each other,” he said. “From the molecular anthropological point of view, this is the most important place in the world.”

The town’s museum — an unimpressive one-story building — has added a Paleolithic display in a cramped room that is dominated by a menacing cave man mannequin. Arrayed around him are Neanderthal, Denisovan and human artifacts.

Tatyana G. Belikova, the curator, pointed out decorative beads that she said were an accessory for cave women.

“A woman wants to be beautiful,” Ms. Belikova elaborated. “Look what she’s done. She’s made beads!”

“I say, ‘Men, if you love your women, why don’t you take some stone, polish it and give it to your women?’” she said, referring to stone ornaments found in the cave, which had been chipped from pink marble.

“Maybe it was a golden age, when all these types lived peacefully together,” she said.

In interviews with residents, this seemed the prevailing view of what Soloneshnoye’s rich scientific yield signifies — though in fact, the nature of the encounters is almost wholly unknown.

Genetic evidence in modern humans is inconclusive about the specifics, according to Dr. Paabo, the geneticist, but the absence of Neanderthal traces in maternal mitochondrial DNA suggests that male Neanderthals mated with female humans.

“Nobody is looking in horror at this background” to human history, Mayor Voronov said. “It is how it should have been. This is our pride in this region.”

Rima Botukayeva, a cosmetologist, sounded offended that a question might even be raised about the genetic evidence of interbreeding so long ago.

“If there was love between them, they must have been attracted to each other,” she said.

The cave itself offers few clues about what actually took place inside. It is musty and cool, though perhaps a campfire and some furs could improve the atmosphere.

To visit is to see human history peeled open; archaeological digs through 21 feet of sediment reveal 22 distinct cultural layers over 282,000 years of habitation.

On a recent warm afternoon, sunshine bathed the nearby rock outcroppings in a golden glow. The scent of pine filled the air, and a stream burbled a hundred yards or so away. In the quiet, one could imagine the appeal of this real estate to those who lived here in the distant past.