Bacho Kiro's women

The big anthro news yesterday was the determination of Bacho Kiro Man in Bulgaria, 45 kBC: modern-human. DOI 10.1038/s41586-020-2259-z.

Svante Pääbo's team did this one. Usually he works with Neanders. As of this Upper Palaeolithic the Neanders hadn't quite died out yet. In fact, in the Balkans the "cave men" may even have been more prevalent.

Everyone had assumed that Bacho Kiro's troglodytes were Neanders. This because their culture spread among the last Neanders in Europe: the jewelry, the tool tech. Two of our tools constrain Bacho Kiro: the age of its remains is 45k BC or younger; and, the mitochondrial DNA of the seven available samples shows that all seven (six complete, one fragmented) were ours by maternal lineage.

If you read the paper, the layer "I" was flooded. At least twice: yielding silt layer H, and then layer G. These layers protected "I" from later troggies. The age is contemporary with Ust'-Ishim in Siberia.

The mtDNA in this layer are M, N, N's subgroup R, and R's subgroup U. As they point out, M in Europe died out - only being repopulated in der Osten by, er, me great-grandmum. Figure 2 in the paper has the M here as most like to the Andamans, not like me. And one of the Ns is a very basal spinoff, also long gone.

Another N is recognisably R, Eurasian. And one of the Rs as noted is U, but not just U but a U clustering with Spain and the Iceman. So, not the Saami, but still so early that K hadn't split yet.

Very unlikely that all these lineages were present among local Neanders doin' kidnaps. This is an assortment of human tribes which had already formed into groups, outside Africa, and reassembled in western Eurasia before entering this cave.

We already know of deep turnover from the Sundaland push a few millennia earlier; I would even reckon the M female presence for evidence of that Easterling invasion. But these men did not overwhelm the Balkans with their M women. If Pääbo ever does look at the Y chromosomes here, I predict the Y will be Sundalander. If a contemporary cave is found north and west, it will bear no M.