@article {315212, title = {Ancient genomes show social and reproductive behavior of early Upper Paleolithic foragers}, journal = {Science}, year = {2017}, month = {2017/10/05}, abstract = {

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. Here, we investigate whether the contemporary HG strategy was already present in the Upper Paleolithic (UP), using complete genome sequences from Sunghir, a site dated to ~34 thousand years BP (kya) containing multiple anatomically modern human (AMH) individuals. We demonstrate 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 UP social organization was similar to that of living HGs, with limited relatedness within residential groups embedded in a larger mating network.

}, doi = {10.1126/science.aao1807}, url = {http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/10/04/science.aao1807}, author = {Sikora, Martin and Seguin-Orlando, Andaine and Sousa, Vitor C. and Albrechtsen, Anders and Korneliussen, Thorfinn and Ko, Amy and Rasmussen, Simon and Dupanloup, Isabelle and Nigst, Philip R. and Bosch, Marjolein D. and Renaud, Gabriel and Allentoft, Morten E. and Margaryan, Ashot and Vasilyev, Sergey V. and Veselovskaya, Elizaveta V. and Borutskaya, Svetlana B. and Devi{\`e}se, Thibaut and Comeskey, Dan and Higham, Tom and Manica, Andrea and Foley, Robert and Meltzer, David J. and Nielsen, Rasmus and Excoffier, Laurent and Lahr, Marta Miraz{\'o}n and Orlando, Ludovic and Willerslev, Eske} }