Afontova Gora

• 1. Introduction

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  On the left bank of the Yenisey River, near the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk, sits Afontova Gora. It is a cluster of Ice Age campsites first excavated in 1884. Over the decades that followed, archaeologists opened site after site along this stretch of riverbank. They turned up mammoth bones and the remains of an ancient dog. They also found human skeletal remains, bones and teeth that were stored away for years until modern genetics caught up with them. Once researchers sequenced that ancient DNA, this quiet stretch of Siberian riverbank turned out to be connected to people living continents away. What do those bones reveal about the hunters who camped here, and how did their genetic trail end up so far from home?

• 2. The Riverbank Sites

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  Afontova Gora I sits on the western bank of the Yenisey River and has produced remains of horse, mammoth, reindeer, steppe bison, and large canids. One canid tibia has been dated to 16,900 years old. A skull once identified as that of a dog is now lost. Its features did not fit the known range of either Pleistocene or present-day northern wolves.

  V.I. Gromov first excavated Afontova Gora II in 1912-1914, uncovering remains of mammoth, Arctic fox, Arctic hare, reindeer, bison, and horse. In 1924, G.P. Sosnovsky, N.K. Auerbach, and V.I. Gromov found the first human fossils there. The site holds seven stratigraphic layers, and Layer 3 proved the richest. It yielded more than 20,000 artefacts, over 450 tools, and more than 250 osseous artefacts of bone, antler, and ivory. Excavators recovered the remains of two individuals from that layer. One was the upper premolar of an 11-15-year-old child. The other was the left radius, ulna, humerus, phalanx, and frontal bone of an adult.

  Ivan Savenkov's original dig at Afontova Gora III was disrupted years later, when mining activity disturbed the site in the late 1880s. It consists of three stratigraphic layers.

  Discovered in 1996, Afontova Gora V has yielded the remains of hare, pika, cave lion, horse, reindeer, bison, and partridge.

  These five or more campsites, layered one atop another, likely mark the eastward advance of mammoth-hunting groups probing new territory along the Yenisey.

• 3. The Human Remains

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  The complex's most famous specimens carry three names: Afontova Gora 1, Afontova Gora 2, and Afontova Gora 3. Only the last two are human, since Afontova Gora 1 refers to the canid remains found at the first site.

  The remains of Afontova Gora 2 were unearthed at Afontova Gora II in the 1920s and have been kept at the Hermitage Museum ever since. Radiocarbon dating places the individual at around 17,000 years old, more precisely 16,930-16,490 years before present.

  In 2014, workers preparing to build a new bridge over the Yenesei River uncovered further remains at Afontova Gora II. The salvage dig recovered bone from two different females. One was the atlas vertebra of an adult. The other was the mandible and five lower teeth of a teenage girl estimated at 14-15 years old, later named Afontova Gora 3.

  Researchers first assumed the new find was roughly the same age as Afontova Gora 2. Direct AMS dating in 2017 instead placed Afontova Gora 3 at around 16,090 cal BC. Her mandible was later described as gracile, slender rather than robust. Dental morphology studies found her teeth most similar to those of the Listvenka child from the Altai-Sayan region. Her teeth were neither clearly western nor eastern, and differed from other Siberian fossils, including those from Mal'ta.

  Her jawbone and few remaining teeth were about to reveal far more than her age, once geneticists got a look at the DNA locked inside them.

• 4. Reading The DNA

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  In 2009, researchers returned to the museum where the remains were kept and extracted DNA from the humerus of Afontova Gora 2. Despite significant contamination, the team recovered a low-coverage genome and confirmed the individual was male.

  Genetically, Afontova Gora 2 showed close affinity to Mal'ta 1, known as the Mal'ta boy. He also showed a closer relationship to the Karitiana people than to the Han Chinese. Around 1.9-2.7 percent of his genome traced back to Neanderthals. His Y-DNA belonged to haplogroup Q1a1-F746, a lineage rarely seen in people alive today.

  Researchers sequenced DNA from one of Afontova Gora 3's teeth and obtained a higher-coverage genome than they had from Afontova Gora 2. The analysis confirmed she was female. Her mitochondrial DNA placed her in Haplogroup R1b, and roughly 2.9-3.7 percent of her genome came from Neanderthals.

  A 2016 study grouped Afontova Gora 2, Afontova Gora 3, and Mal'ta 1 together in what researchers called a Mal'ta cluster, sharing common descent. Yet Afontova Gora 3 was not genetically closer to Afontova Gora 2 than she was to Mal'ta 1. Compared with Mal'ta 1, her lineage contributed more to modern humans and sits closer to Native Americans.

  Her genome held one more surprise: a single mutated letter of DNA that would turn out to be the earliest known trace of a trait still visible in millions of faces today.

• 5. The Blond Hair Mutation

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  That mutation carries the designation rs12821256, a single-nucleotide change associated with, and likely responsible for, blond hair color. Afontova Gora 3 is the earliest individual known to carry this derived allele.

  The same allele later turns up in three Eastern Hunter-Gatherer individuals from Samara, Motala, and Ukraine, dated to around 10,000 years before present. Those individuals descend largely from the Ancient North Eurasian population, suggesting the mutation originated there before spreading west into Eurasia.

  Massive migrations later carried people with substantial Ancient North Eurasian ancestry out of the steppe and into continental Europe. They brought with them hundreds of millions of copies of that single mutated letter.

  The trail these genes left did not stop in Siberia. It resurfaces again, thousands of years later, in remains found in a very different part of the world.

• 6. The Tarim Mummies Connection

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  A 2021 genetic study found that the Tarim mummies were primarily descended from a population represented by the Afontova Gora 3 specimen. Researchers described the genetic relationship as showing 'high affinity' with that specimen.

  That single ancient genome accounts for about 72 percent of the Tarim mummies' ancestry. The remaining 28 percent traces to Baikal populations from the Early Bronze Age.

  This makes the Tarim mummies one of the rare Holocene populations whose ancestry is mostly Ancient North Eurasian. That Ancient North Eurasian ancestry traces specifically to the Mal'ta and Afontova Gora populations. The two are separated by around 14,000 years.

  Researchers rank the Tarim mummies above every other ancient population studied, calling them 'the best representatives' of the Ancient North Eurasians.