An article published in the journal “Science” reports the extraction of nuclear DNA belonging to Neanderthals from sediments excavated in deposits in northern Spain and Siberia. A team of researchers led by Benjamin Vernot of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, used techniques to extract DNA from sediments developed over the past few years. At the Spanish site, this made it possible to discover DNA linked to different Neanderthal populations with one population being replaced by another about 100,000 years ago.

An article published in the journal “Nature Communications” reports a research on a fossil bone attributed to a Homo erectus that led to the discovery of two other fossils in the same area, near the east shore of Lake Turkana, Kenya. A team of researchers led by Ashley Hammond, assistant curator in the American Museum of Natural History’s Division of Anthropology, conducted an investigation to try to understand whether that skull bone really was the oldest fossil of Homo erectus or, as some suspected, it came from a more recent layer and got moved by water or wind. The survey supports the age attributed to the fossil of nearly 1.9 million years.

An article in the journal “Nature” reports a genetic study on some human beings who lived in Bacho Kiro Cave, in today’s Bulgaria, the most ancient modern humans dated so far with reasonable certainty. A team of researchers managed to obtain DNA from the available bones, which was analyzed at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The comparison with the genetic characteristics of today’s European and Asian populations shows how those ancient humans spread and that they had some Neanderthal ancestors.