The Wanderers of the Steppe: How a Crimean Bone Rewrote the Map of Neanderthal Migrations

The Bone That Shouldn’t Have Mattered

Protein analyses helped researchers identify a Crimean fossil (the probable leg bone seen here from two views) as that of a Neandertal. DNA from the fossil showed links to Neandertals who lived 3,000 kilometers to the east. Credit: Emily Pigott

For years, it sat among thousands of unremarkable animal fragments. Roughly five centimeters long, the weathered sliver of bone from the Starosele rock shelter in Crimea looked no different from the countless others unearthed there. It took the combined power of collagen fingerprinting, radiocarbon dating, and ancient DNA sequencing to reveal what the naked eye could not: this was a Neanderthal.

Excavations decades ago at Crimea’s Starosele rock-shelter, shown here, yielded a fossil bone that has now divulged a genetic glimpse of long-distance Neandertal treks into Asia. Credit: Serhii Telizhenko

The team led by Emily Pigott¹ of the University of Vienna dubbed it Star 1, and its discovery would connect the limestone cliffs of Crimea to the windswept mountains of Siberia—3,000 kilometers away.

“The genetic link between Starosele and the Altai is the clearest evidence yet that Neanderthal groups were not confined local populations,” says Dr. Elena Rossi, a paleoanthropologist at Cambridge University. “They were mobile, resilient, and capable of crossing ecological boundaries that once seemed insurmountable.”