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Sure
it's easy to underestimate the Neanderthals as dumb cavemen - after all,
they're extinct and we're still here. But were we wrong about our cave-dwelling
cousins?
For instance, were Neanderthals just dumb cavemen or were they actually cave Casanovas? Here's an intriguing study that showed that early Homo sapiens ended up interbreeding with Neanderthals (and actually made us stronger):
Cue in the sleeping with cavemen jokes ...Are scientists sure we mated with Neanderthals?
Yes: The proof is in our DNA. As much as four percent of the DNA in some people now living was originally Neanderthal, according to the study. Importantly, some of that DNA is found in the part of the human genome known as the HLA (human leucocyte antigen) sequence of genes, which plays a critical role in our immune defenses. "The cross-breeding wasn't just a random event," says lead researcher Peter Parham of Stanford University, as quoted in the Daily Mail. "It gave something useful to the modern human."
Research by the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian natural history museum shows us that Neanderthals were not all that different from modern humans in their eating habits. They ate grains and vegetables as well as meat, and they cooked their dinners, too!
Researchers found grains from numerous plants, including a type of wild grass, as well as traces of roots and tubers, trapped in plaque buildup on fossilized Neanderthal teeth unearthed in northern Europe and Iraq.
Many of the particles “had undergone physical changes that matched experimentally-cooked starch grains, suggesting that Neanderthals controlled fire much like early modern humans,” PNAS said in a statement.
Stone artifacts have not provided evidence that Neanderthals used tools to grind plants, suggesting they did not practice agriculture, but the new research indicates they cooked and prepared plants for eating, it said.
Link -via J-Walk Blog
A new theory says that volcanic activity in Europe’s past may have contributed to the extinction of Neanderthals. Several volcanos erupted in a short period of time along the Caucasus Mountains about 40,000 years ago. Populations of Neanderthals, who lived mainly in Europe, may have been reduced to the point they couldn’t compete with modern humans who lived in several continents. University of Texas, Arlington anthropologist Naomi Cleghorn, a member of the research team, explained what they found.
The researchers examined sediments layer from around 40,000 years ago in Russia’s Mezmaiskaya Cave and found that the more volcanic ash a layer had, the less plant pollen it contained.
“We tested all the layers for this volcanic ash signature. The most volcanic-ash-rich layer”—likely corresponding to the so-called Campanian Ignimbrite eruption, which occurred near Naples (map)—”had no [tree] pollen and very little pollen from other types of plants,” Cleghorn said. “It’s just a sterile layer.”
The loss of plants would have led to a decline in plant-eating mammals, which in turn would have affected the Neanderthals, who hunted large mammals for food.
Modern humans would have also been affected, but they had “backup populations” in Africa and Asia. Link
(Image credit: Kenneth Garrett, National Geographic)
That’s the provocative title of an article in this month’s Archaeology magazine exploring the scientific, legal, and ethical considerations involved. Extensive information about the Neanderthal genetic code is available, and the technologic problems can apparently be overcome. Questions remain about how the process might best be accomplished, and whether it should be done at all.
The Neanderthals broke away from the lineage of modern humans around 450,000 years ago… As different as Neanderthals were, they may not have been different enough to be considered a separate species. “There are humans today who are more different from each other in phenotype [physical characteristics],” says John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin… Many of the differences between a Neanderthal clone and a modern human would be due to genetic changes our species has undergone since Neanderthals became extinct… Clones created from a genome that is more than 30,000 years old will not have immunity to a wide variety of diseases, some of which would likely be fatal. They will be lactose intolerant, have difficulty metabolizing alcohol, be prone to developing Alzheimer’s disease, and maybe most importantly, will have brains different from modern people’s…
“I think there would be no question that if you cloned a Neanderthal, that individual would be recognized as having human rights under the Constitution and international treaties,” says Lori Andrews, a professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law. The law does not define what a human being is, but legal scholars are debating questions of human rights in cases involving genetic engineering…
Hawks believes the barriers to Neanderthal cloning will come down. “We are going to bring back the mammoth… the impetus against doing Neanderthal because it is too weird is going to go away.” He doesn’t think creating a Neanderthal clone is ethical science, but points out that there are always people who are willing to overlook the ethics. “In the end,” Hawks says, “we are going to have a cloned Neanderthal, I’m just sure of it.”
Much more at the link. The image is a computer-assisted reconstruction of a Neanderthal child by a research team at the University of Zurich.
Previously on Neatorama: Misconceptions About Neanderthals, and Cavemen Did Have Compassion: They Cared for Disabled Children.
Scientists from the U.K., on an archaeological dig in the Murcia province of southern Spain, have made a discovery that seems to suggest that Neanderthals wore makeup.
The team report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that shells containing pigment residues were Neanderthal make-up containers.
The team says its find buries “the view of Neanderthals as half-wits” and shows they were capable of symbolic thinking.
Professor Joao Zilhao, the archaeologist from Bristol University in the UK, who led the study, said that he and his team had examined shells that were used as containers to mix and store pigments.
Black sticks of the pigment manganese, which may have been used as body paint by Neanderthals, have previously been discovered in Africa.
“[But] this is the first secure evidence for their use of cosmetics,” he told BBC News. “The use of these complex recipes is new. It’s more than body painting.”
From the Upcoming 
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The standard theories of why Neandertals disappeared 28,000 years ago don’t hold up, so scientists are looking in new directions. The assimilation/interbreeding theory should’ve yielded some DNA evidence, but there is none. The replacement/war theory isn’t as cut and dried as it could be, since modern humans lived in the same territories as Neandertals for 15,000 years. Climate change? Sure, the earth was cooling at the time, but Neandertals had lived through ice ages before.
But the isotope data reveal that far from progressing steadily from mild to frigid, the climate became increasingly unstable heading into the last glacial maximum, swinging severely and abruptly. With that flux came profound ecological change: forests gave way to treeless grassland; reindeer replaced certain kinds of rhinoceroses. So rapid were these oscillations that over the course of an individual’s lifetime, all the plants and animals that a person had grown up with could vanish and be replaced with unfamiliar flora and fauna. And then, just as quickly, the environment could change back again.
Scientists are looking into the idea that Neandertals just weren’t as adaptable as modern humans, and over time lost out in the competition for resources in a changing world. Link -via Metafilter
Researchers from the Universite de la Mediterranee-CNRS-EFS in France analyzed the DNA of Neanderthal fossils and found that the species might actually be composed of several "races":
We tend to think of Neanderthals as one species of cavemen-like creatures, but now scientists say there were actually at least three different subgroups of Neanderthals.
Using computer simulations to analyze DNA sequence fragments from 12 Neanderthal fossils, researchers found that the species can be separated into three, or maybe four, distinct genetic groups.
The evidence points to a subgroup of Neanderthals in Western Europe, another in Southern Europe near the Mediterranean, a third in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and possibly a fourth in Western Asia. These groups have been postulated before, but this is the first study analyzing DNA data to look for genetic variations differentiating the subgroups.
(Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
Neanderthals and their precursor, an early human species called Homo heidelbergensis, were often thought of as violent and uncaring, rejecting newborns with severe deformities.
A recent discovery, however, may change the picture: they might have cared for their disabled children.
… a new study shows that a 530,000-year-old fossil skull belonged to a child who lived to around the age of ten despite being born with a rare birth defect known as craniosynostosis, in which the skull segments close too early, interfering with brain development. [...]
Increased pressure on the brain due to the deformity might have led to learning difficulties and health problems such as mental retardation.
"All children need care," noted study team leader Ana Gracia of the Centro UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamientos Humanos in Madrid. But this child would likely have required "special need care" to have lived as long as it did, she said.
