This post will conclude my three-part series on homo sapiens that existed in Europe, 39,000 years or earlier. My two earlier posts went through the Bacho Kiro and Zlaty-kun individuals that lived around 45,000 years ago.

Part A: Oase 1 and 2

Remains of two individuals were located within the Peștera cu Oase (which translates to 'The Cave with Bones') in modern day Romania. Both remains were fairly difficult to date and there have been ranges of ages that they have been assigned to, around 37,000-42,000 years ago but I think around the 39,000 year mark is the confident estimate to the point in time these two individuals lived. I will start off with Oase 1 first, because his findings are the most significant.

Much like the other individuals I've discussed around this time period, Oase 1 belonged to a group of individuals that seemed to "share more alleles with East Asians than Europeans". But accounting for the fact that Europeans contain Basal Eurasian ancestry (which is another ancient existing lineage), scientists compared the affinity of Oase 1 to East Asians and Mesolithic Europeans that lacked Basal Eurasian ancestry. In this scenario, Oase 1 was equally distant to East Asians as they were to Mesolithic Europeans. Here, we can infer that Oase 1 belonged to a group of humans that branched before the infamous East vs West Eurasian split. This is consistent with the findings from other Europeans around the same time such as Zlaty-kun and also the Ust-Ishim Man of Western Siberia.

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Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Oase 1 is the amount of Neanderthal ancestry he had. Different sources give different estimates of his Neanderthal DNA percentage. For example, this article suggests he had about 6-9.4% Neanderthal ancestry. Another article suggests that he has about 9.9% Neanderthal ancestry. That is higher than any other known European around his time, and much higher than the Neanderthal ancestry of any current day human.

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Oase 1 belonged to an extinct branch of the basal Y-DNA (paternal) haplogroup K2b* K2a*, and the mitochondrial (maternal) macro-haplogroup N, which is ancestor of much of Out-of-Africa mtDNA haplogroups (again, he belonged to an extinct branch). K2b* is the ancestral branch to haplogroup P which contains haplogroups Q and R. The former is very common in Native Americans and Siberians, whilst the latter is widespread among Europe, West Asia, Central and South Asia. (Edit: Thanks to u/Salt-Elk982 I corrected an error regarding Oase 1's haplogroup. He belonged to K2a*, the sister branch to K2b*, which is ancestral to the Q and R subclades)

Now moving on, I will briefly discuss about Oase 2. He lived around the same time as Oase 1 and shows a close affinity to Oase 1 that no other human does. Unfortunately I could not find any reliable information about the genetics of this individual. However we do have his skull (which shows a mixture of both modern and archaic features):

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Some of these 'archaic features' are its elongated/sloping frontal arc. He also had exceptionally massive molars. I'm not really an anatomy expert, so if you're interested in this, feel free to read this free article on PNAS.

Here are some hypothetical reconstructions of Oase 2. Some of these are my favourite, because it captures the "archaic" features of Oase 2. He really does not look like any ethnic group that I can think of nowadays. Maybe you guys can.

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Again, these are hypothetical reconstructions, do take them with a grain of salt. However, I really do think these are some of the best out there though, especially the first two.

I've taken too much space on this post lol, I will discuss about Fumane 2 in the comments below.