Remains of bones and teeth from two Siberian caves are helping scientists decipher the social organization of Neanderthals through genetic studies for the first time, including the remains of a father and his teenage daughter, Reuters writes.

Researchers on Wednesday described genomic findings from the remains of 13 Neanderthals — 11 from Chagir Cave and two from Okladnikova Cave in Russia’s Altai Mountains — in one of the largest population genetic studies of Neanderthals to date.

Paleolithic remains date back to about 54,000 years ago.

These Neanderthal communities consisted of small, close-knit family groups of 10 to 20 members, and women were the ones who migrated between communities.

Neighbors with Denisovets

The caves are located at the extreme eastern end of the known geographic range of the Neanderthals, who lived in parts of western Eurasia, while another now-extinct race called the Denisovans occupied parts of eastern Eurasia.

The caves are located less than 100 km from where the first Denisovan remains were found, but the study found no evidence of interbreeding between these 13 Neanderthals and Denisovans. At that time, our species had not yet reached this region.

“I think our information makes it easier to identify Neanderthals and, in a sense, more human. These were people who lived and died in small families, probably in harsh conditions. But they managed to persist for hundreds of thousands of years,” said population geneticist Benjamin Peter of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, co-author of the study published in the journal Nature.

Neanderthals, with a sturdier build than Homo sapiens and larger eyebrows, lived from about 430,000 years ago to about 40,000 years ago.

Among the 13 Neanderthals were five children and teenagers. There were seven men and six women.

They were smart. Far from the stereotype of cattle

The remains of an adult male father and his teenage daughter were found in the Chagyr Cave. There was also a boy between the ages of 8 and 12, according to the dentist, and an adult relative who, according to genetic results, could be an aunt, cousin or grandmother.

Scientists have found numerous stone tools and animal bones in the two caves, suggesting the existence of small hunter-gatherer communities whose members hunted bison, horses and other animals that migrated through the river valleys below these caves.

Far from the outdated stereotype of mindless animals, research has shown that Neanderthals were intelligent, using sophisticated group hunting techniques, body-painting pigments, symbolic objects, and possibly spoken language.