‘Altamura Man’ – The Oldest Neanderthal DNA Ever Collected Sheds Light On The Early History Of Hominids

MessageToEagle.com – The fossil skeleton of ‘Altamura Man’ imprisoned in calcite formations and found in a cave in 1993 in Puglia, Italy belongs to the species Homo neanderthalensis, according to an Italian study led by Giorgio Manzi of the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.

Analysis of calcium formations on ‘Altamura Man’ – embedded in an Italian cave and coated in a thick layer of calcite – shows that it formed 172,000 to 130,000 years ago during a period when ice sheets were expanding from out of Antarctica and Greenland.
Thus, the skeleton from Altamura represents the most ancient Neanderthal from which endogenous DNA has ever been extracted.

In 1993, a fossil hominin skeleton was discovered at the end of a narrow tunnel of a cave in the district Lamalunga, near Altamura, in southern Italy.
‘Despite the fact that this specimen represents one of the most extraordinary hominin specimens ever found in Europe, for the last two decades our knowledge of it has been based purely on the documented on-site observations,’ according to research paper.

Recently, researchers – who extracted the oldest ever DNA sample to be taken from a Neanderthal – analyzed a small piece of the skeleton’s shoulder bone.

They could determine the Neanderthal was 128,000 to 187,000 years old. He had likely fallen into the hole and died of starvation or perhaps died from lack of water.

Now the researchers will test the DNA sample.

Paper.

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