German villagers share DNA with cavemen

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 15/07/2008

Local people in a small German village share the same rare DNA pattern as the bones of cavemen who lived in the area 3,000 years ago.

The Bronze Age remains were discovered by archaeologists in the Lichtensteinhohle cave in the foothills of the Harz mountains in Lower Saxony, near the village of Nienstedt in 1994.

The bones of 40 people were shielded from the elements by calcium deposits that formed a protective skin around the skeletons.

All the remains turned out to be from the same family group who had a distinctive - and rare - DNA pattern.

When people in the local area were tested with saliva swabs, two nearby residents turned out to have the same distinctive genetic characteristic.

Manfred Huchthausen, a 58-year-old teacher, and Uwe Lange, a 48-year-old surveyer, now believe they are even more local than either of them thought.

"We used to play in these caves as kids," said Mr Lange. "If I'd known that there were 3,000-year-old relatives buried there I wouldn't have set foot in the place."

Source: The Telegtaph

wild. ALMOST makes me want to submit my DNA.

Sure would be cool to have another link in my personal "where'd I come from?" question.

I think something similar was discovered in the north of england several months back. Quite amazing that people have stayed in one place for so long when we get all these theories of population migrations etcetera.

Well that explains my husband!

3000 years really isn't that long ago..........

LOL well put!!

Thank you. Thank you very much.

That is N-U-T-S Is that supposed to mean that they're directly descended from cavepeople? If so, that's really cool. Makes you wonder how close-knit their community really is though.

Wouldn't that be a given? What I mean is, they are from that region and their ancestors for generations. The poster is right 3,000 years isn't really that long ago in the scheme of things. I thought by the title of the link they had found Neanderthal DNA or something lol I was excited for a minute.

There's always the 1990's study that found living descendents of the approx. 9,000-year-old Cheddar Man. I'm pretty sure that's about how old his remains were.

I'm surprised there were folks living in caves, 3000 years ago. After all, agriculture had developed by that time, as well as trade/barter. Civilizations had come and gone, and was on the upswing.

I realize these might have been some very impoverished people, with no better place to go.

We ALL share our DNA with cavemen, who do you think our relations are?

What's amazing is they found matches after testing only twenty people.
Here's the story.


[edit] Mitochondrial DNA testing
In the late 1990s, Bryan Sykes of Oxford University first sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of Cheddar Man, with DNA extracted from one of Cheddar Man's molars. Cheddar Man was determined to have belonged to a branch of mitochondrial haplogroup U, a haplogroup which is especially common in Britain, Ireland and the Basque Country of northern Spain and south western France. Haplogroup U is generally found to be most common in southern and western Europe and may have originated in West Asia. Bryan Sykes' research into Cheddar Man was filmed as he performed it. As a means of connecting Cheddar Man to the living residents of Cheddar village, he compared mitochondrial DNA taken from twenty living residents of the village to that extracted from Cheddar Man’s molar. It produced two exact matches and one match with a single mutation. The two exact matches were schoolchildren, and their names were not released. The close match was a history teacher named Adrian Targett. [1][2]

This modern connection to Cheddar Man (who died at least three thousand years before agriculture began in Britain) makes very credible the theory that modern-day Britons are not all descended from Middle-Eastern migratory farmers, but rather modern Britons are descended from ancient European Palaeolithic and Mesolithic hunter-gatherer tribes who much later on adopted farming.[citation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_Man