to check whether DNA was preserved in the caves. If we could show that their bones contained DNA, this might be a good means to convince hesitant curators that they should allow us to try the much more valuable Neanderthal remains from the same cave. I decided to interest myself in cave-bear history, especially in the Balkans.
After a bloody war with Serbia, Zagreb had become the capital of the independent Republic of Croatia. The largest collection of Neanderthals there is from Krapina, in northern Croatia, where starting in 1899 the paleontologist Dragutin Gorjanovi ć -Kramberger discovered more than eight hundred bones from some seventy-five Neanderthals—the richest cache of Neanderthals ever found. These bones are today housed in the Museum of Natural History in the medieval center of Zagreb. The other site, Vindija Cave (see Figure 6.1) in northwestern Croatia, was excavated by another Croatian paleontologist, Mirko Malez, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He found bone fragments of several Neanderthals but no spectacular crania like those found in Krapina. Malez also found enormous amounts of cave-bear bones. His finds are housed in Zagreb, too, in the Institute for Quaternary Paleontology and Geology, which belongs to the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. I arranged to visit both this institute and the Museum of Natural History. In August 1999, I arrived in Zagreb.
The Krapina Neanderthal collection was extremely impressive, but I was skeptical about its potential for DNA research. The bones were at least 120,000 years old and therefore older than anything we had found to yield DNA. The Vindija collection looked more promising. First of all, it was younger. Several layers in the excavation had yielded Neanderthal remains, but the uppermost and thus the youngest one to do so was between 30,000 or 40,000 years old—young, as far as Neanderthals go. I saw a second exciting feature of the Vindija collection: it was full to overflowing with ancient cave-bear bones. They were stored, according to bone type and layer, in innumerable paper sacks that were coming apart in the humidity of the Quaternary Institute’s basement. There were sacks full of ribs, others full of vertebrae, others of long bones, and yet others of foot bones. It was an ancient DNA gold mine.
Figure 6.1. Vindija Cave in Croatia. Photo: J. Krause, MPI-EVA.
In charge of the Vindija collection was Maja Paunovic, a woman of a certain age who spent her days in an institute without public exhibitions and with few facilities for doing research. She was friendly enough but understandably dour—no doubt aware that science had passed her by. I spent three days with Maja, going through the bones. She gave me cave-bear bones from several layers at the Vindija site as well as small samples of fifteen of the Neanderthal bones. This seemed exactly what we needed for the next step in our exploration of the genetic variation among Neanderthals. When I flew back to Munich I felt confident that we would make quick progress.
In the meantime, Matthias Krings had extended his sequencing of the Neanderthal type specimen to a second part of the mitochondrial genome. The results confirmed that this specimen’s mitochondrial DNA shared a common ancestor with present-day human mtDNAs about half a million years ago. But this was of course what we had expected, so the news felt slightly boring after the emotional high produced by the first Neanderthal sequences. Not surprisingly, he was eager to throw himself on the fifteen Neanderthal bone samples I had gotten from Maja in Zagreb.
We first analyzed their state of amino-acid preservation. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins and can be analyzed from much smaller samples than are needed for DNA extractions. We had shown before that if we could not find an amino-acid profile suggesting that the samples contained collagen (the main protein in bones), and if the amino acids were not present largely in the
After a bloody war with Serbia, Zagreb had become the capital of the independent Republic of Croatia. The largest collection of Neanderthals there is from Krapina, in northern Croatia, where starting in 1899 the paleontologist Dragutin Gorjanovi ć -Kramberger discovered more than eight hundred bones from some seventy-five Neanderthals—the richest cache of Neanderthals ever found. These bones are today housed in the Museum of Natural History in the medieval center of Zagreb. The other site, Vindija Cave (see Figure 6.1) in northwestern Croatia, was excavated by another Croatian paleontologist, Mirko Malez, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He found bone fragments of several Neanderthals but no spectacular crania like those found in Krapina. Malez also found enormous amounts of cave-bear bones. His finds are housed in Zagreb, too, in the Institute for Quaternary Paleontology and Geology, which belongs to the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. I arranged to visit both this institute and the Museum of Natural History. In August 1999, I arrived in Zagreb.
The Krapina Neanderthal collection was extremely impressive, but I was skeptical about its potential for DNA research. The bones were at least 120,000 years old and therefore older than anything we had found to yield DNA. The Vindija collection looked more promising. First of all, it was younger. Several layers in the excavation had yielded Neanderthal remains, but the uppermost and thus the youngest one to do so was between 30,000 or 40,000 years old—young, as far as Neanderthals go. I saw a second exciting feature of the Vindija collection: it was full to overflowing with ancient cave-bear bones. They were stored, according to bone type and layer, in innumerable paper sacks that were coming apart in the humidity of the Quaternary Institute’s basement. There were sacks full of ribs, others full of vertebrae, others of long bones, and yet others of foot bones. It was an ancient DNA gold mine.
Figure 6.1. Vindija Cave in Croatia. Photo: J. Krause, MPI-EVA.
In charge of the Vindija collection was Maja Paunovic, a woman of a certain age who spent her days in an institute without public exhibitions and with few facilities for doing research. She was friendly enough but understandably dour—no doubt aware that science had passed her by. I spent three days with Maja, going through the bones. She gave me cave-bear bones from several layers at the Vindija site as well as small samples of fifteen of the Neanderthal bones. This seemed exactly what we needed for the next step in our exploration of the genetic variation among Neanderthals. When I flew back to Munich I felt confident that we would make quick progress.
In the meantime, Matthias Krings had extended his sequencing of the Neanderthal type specimen to a second part of the mitochondrial genome. The results confirmed that this specimen’s mitochondrial DNA shared a common ancestor with present-day human mtDNAs about half a million years ago. But this was of course what we had expected, so the news felt slightly boring after the emotional high produced by the first Neanderthal sequences. Not surprisingly, he was eager to throw himself on the fifteen Neanderthal bone samples I had gotten from Maja in Zagreb.
We first analyzed their state of amino-acid preservation. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins and can be analyzed from much smaller samples than are needed for DNA extractions. We had shown before that if we could not find an amino-acid profile suggesting that the samples contained collagen (the main protein in bones), and if the amino acids were not present largely in the
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