TY - JOUR
T1 - Paleogenomes reveal the evolutionary relationship between modern and cave lions
AU - Stanton, David W. G.
AU - Bergström, Anders
AU - Heintzman, Peter D.
AU - van der Valk, Tom
AU - Carmagnini, Alberto
AU - Ersmark, Erik
AU - Pawar, Harvinder
AU - Sandoval-Velasco, Marcela
AU - Androsov, Semyon
AU - Fedorov, Sergey
AU - Kuhlwilm, Martin
AU - Nagel, Doris
AU - Plotnikov, Valeri
AU - Protopopov, Albert
AU - Shapiro, Beth
AU - Barnett, Ross
AU - Sinding, Mikkel-Holger S.
AU - Marques-Bonet, Tomas
AU - Yamaguchi, Nobuyuki
AU - Gilbert, M. Thomas P.
AU - Götherström, Anders
AU - Skoglund, Pontus
AU - Frantz, Laurent
AU - Dalén, Love
N1 - Data and code availability:
All short-read sequencing data generated in this study have been deposited in the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) under project accession PRJEB83684. Individual experiment accessions are available under ERX13487333–ERX13500950 and are listed in Table S2.
All original code used to perform forward simulations has been deposited at Zenodo (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19890537) and is publicly available as of the date of publication.
Any additional information required to reanalyze the data reported in this paper is available from the lead contact upon request.
PY - 2026/7/9
Y1 - 2026/7/9
N2 - The Eurasian cave lion was abundant across the Northern Hemisphere before the Late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions. However, the extent of the distinction between cave and modern lions and their adaptive differences have remained unclear. Using 12 cave lion genomes spanning more than 100,000 years, we show that modern and cave lions were distinct evolutionary lineages with separate demographic histories and unique non-synonymous variants. We also identify evidence of ancient gene flow between them, with the best modern lion proxy for this ancestry being an extinct Southwest Asian population. This admixture correlates with global ice extent, with 3.2%–4.4% modern lion ancestry detected in a ∼20,000-year-old cave lion from Central East Asia. These findings provide insight into the evolutionary history of the cave lion, once one of the Northern Hemisphere’s most ecologically impactful megafaunal species.
AB - The Eurasian cave lion was abundant across the Northern Hemisphere before the Late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions. However, the extent of the distinction between cave and modern lions and their adaptive differences have remained unclear. Using 12 cave lion genomes spanning more than 100,000 years, we show that modern and cave lions were distinct evolutionary lineages with separate demographic histories and unique non-synonymous variants. We also identify evidence of ancient gene flow between them, with the best modern lion proxy for this ancestry being an extinct Southwest Asian population. This admixture correlates with global ice extent, with 3.2%–4.4% modern lion ancestry detected in a ∼20,000-year-old cave lion from Central East Asia. These findings provide insight into the evolutionary history of the cave lion, once one of the Northern Hemisphere’s most ecologically impactful megafaunal species.
KW - ancient DNA
KW - demography
KW - evolution
KW - genomics
KW - hybridization
KW - paleogenomics
KW - Panthera spelaea
KW - speciation
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105040774907
U2 - 10.1016/j.cell.2026.05.007
DO - 10.1016/j.cell.2026.05.007
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:105040774907
SN - 0092-8674
VL - 189
SP - 4425-4436.e11
JO - Cell
JF - Cell
IS - 14
ER -