Neanderthal inheritance helped humans adapt to life outside of Africa

As the ancestors of modern humans made their way out of Africa to other parts of the world many thousands of years ago, they met up and in some cases had children with other forms of humans, including the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Scientists know this because traces of those meetings remain in the human genome. Now, researchers reporting in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on November 10 find more evidence that those encounters have benefited humans over the years.

All told, the new study identifies 126 different places in the genome where genes inherited from those archaic humans remain at unusually high frequency in the genomes of modern humans around the world. We owe our long-lost hominid relatives for various traits, and especially those related to our immune systems and skin, the evidence shows.

"Our work shows that hybridization was not just some curious side note to human history, but had important consequences and contributed to our ancestors' ability to adapt to different environments as they dispersed throughout the world," says Joshua Akey of University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.

Akey says it's relatively straightforward today to identify sequences that were inherited from archaic ancestors. Studies show that non-African individuals inherited about 2% of their genomes from Neanderthals. People of Melanesian ancestry inherited another 2% to 4% of their genomes from Denisovan ancestors. But it hasn't been clear what influence those DNA sequences have had on our biology, traits, and evolutionary history.

In the new study, the researchers took advantage of recently constructed genome-scale maps of Neanderthal and Denisovan sequences identified in more than 1,500 geographically diverse people. Their sample included close to 500 individuals each from East Asia, Europe, and South Asia. They also analyzed the genomes of 27 individuals from Island Melanesia, an area including Indonesia, New Guinea, Fiji, and Vanuatu. The researchers were searching for archaic DNA sequences in those human genomes at frequencies much higher than would be expected if those genes weren't doing people any good.

While the vast majority of surviving Neanderthal and Denisovan sequences are found at relatively low frequencies (typically less than 5%), the new analyses turned up 126 places in our genomes where these archaic sequences exist at much higher frequencies, reaching up to about 65%. Seven of those regions were found in parts of the genome known to play a role in characteristics of our skin. Another 31 are involved in immunity.

"The ability to increase to such high population frequencies was most likely facilitated because these sequences were advantageous," Akey explains. "In addition, many of the high-frequency sequences span genes involved in the immune system, which is a frequent target of adaptive evolution."

Generally speaking, the genes humans got from Neanderthals or Denisovans are important for our interactions with the environment. The evidence suggests that hybridization with archaic humans as our ancient ancestors made their way out of Africa "was an efficient way for modern humans to quickly adapt to the new environments they were encountering."

The researchers say they'd now like to learn more about how these genes influenced humans' ability to survive and what implications they might have for disease. They are also interested in expanding their analysis to include geographically diverse populations in other parts of the world, including Africa.
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Reference:

EurekAlert. 2016. “Neanderthal inheritance helped humans adapt to life outside of Africa”. EurekAlert. Posted: October 10, 2016. Available online: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-11/cp-nih110316.php

Novel collagen fingerprinting identifies a Neanderthal bone among 2,000 fragments

Scientists from the universities of Oxford and Manchester have used a new molecular fingerprinting technique to identify one Neanderthal bone from around 2,000 tiny bone fragments. 

All the tiny pieces of bone were recovered from a key archaeological site, Denisova Cave in Russia, with the remaining fragments found to be from animal species like mammoths, woolly rhino, wolf and reindeer. It is the first time that researchers have identified traces of an extinct human from an archaeological site using a technique called 'Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry' or ZooMS. From just a microscopic sample of bone, their analysis revealed the collagen peptide sequences in the bone that mark out one species from another. Their paper, which appears in the journal Scientific Reports, suggests that ZooMS has huge potential to increase our understanding of human evolution, including the amount of interbreeding that went on between our closely related cousins and modern humans.

The international research team was led by Professor Thomas Higham and his student Sam Brown of the University of Oxford, with the developer of the ZooMS method, Dr Michael Buckley from the University of Manchester; the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig; Cranfield University; and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Russia. The sequences of collagen peptides in bone differ in tiny ways between different animal species. The team profiled the sequences using microscopic samples from 2,300 unidentified bone fragments from the site. They then compared the sequences obtained against a reference library of peptides from known animal species.

On discovering that one 2.5 cm-long piece of bone had a clear human fingerprint, Sam Brown said: 'When the ZooMS results showed that there was a human fingerprint among the bones I was extremely excited. After a lot of hard work, finding this tiny bone which yields so much information about our human past was just fantastic. The bone itself is not exceptional in any way and would otherwise be missed by anyone looking for possible human bones amongst the dozens of fragments that we have from the site.'

Study co-author Professor Svante Pääbo and his group from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig found that the bone belonged to a Neanderthal on the basis of its mitochrondrial genome. The results suggest that this Neanderthal was most closely related to other Neanderthals in the Altai region and more distantly related to those further to the west. The Neanderthal bone was also radiocarbon dated and shown to be more than 50,000 years old, as expected based on its deep position in the site. Acid etching on the surface of the bone also shows that it probably passed through the stomach of a hyaena for a short time before it was deposited in the cave sediments, says the paper.

Denisova Cave in the Russian Altai region is a key site for archaeologists wanting to understand the nature of evolution over the last 100,000 years. Its cold climate means that bones from the cave are often exceptionally well-preserved in their DNA and collagen, which is ideal for genetics and radiocarbon dating. In 2010, Pääbo and his team discovered a new species of human, the so-called 'Denisovans' at the site, using state-of-the-art genetic methods. His team have also found that Denisovans, Neanderthals and modern humans interbred periodically with one another in Eurasia and Europe.

During the Ice Age, there were periods when the cave was also occupied by carnivores such as hyaenas and wolves that crunched the bones into tiny pieces. This is why more than 95% of the bone fragments excavated were difficult to identify.

Professor Thomas Higham said: 'This is a real breakthrough, showing that we can now use bioarchaeological methods like ZooMS to search the archaeological record and find even tiny fossil remains, where there are proteins that survive. In the Palaeolithic period, where we have Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans, this is potentially very important because if the fragments that we recover are big enough then we can date and analyse the DNA from the same bone. One of the big challenges is in understanding what happened when modern humans and Neanderthals met. We want to know over what period of time and where this happened. Fossils are the key, but for modern humans they are extremely rare in archaeological sites. We hope that more work like this will yield more human bone remains.'
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Reference:

Phys.org. 2016. “Novel collagen fingerprinting identifies a Neanderthal bone among 2,000 fragments”. Phys.org. Posted: March 29, 2016. Available online: http://phys.org/news/2016-03-collagen-fingerprinting-neanderthal-bone-fragments.html

Neanderthal DNA has subtle but significant impact on human traits

Since 2010 scientists have known that people of Eurasian origin have inherited anywhere from 1 to 4 percent of their DNA from Neanderthals.

The discovery spawned a number of hypotheses about the effects these genetic variants may have on the physical characteristics or behavior of modern humans, ranging from skin color to heightened allergies to fat metabolism... generating dozens of colorful headlines including "What your Neanderthal DNA is doing for you" and "Neanderthals are to blame for our allergies" and "Did Europeans Get Fat From Neanderthals?"

Now, the first study that directly compares Neanderthal DNA in the genomes of a significant population of adults of European ancestry with their clinical records confirms that this archaic genetic legacy has a subtle but significant impact on modern human biology.

"Our main finding is that Neanderthal DNA does influence clinical traits in modern humans: We discovered associations between Neanderthal DNA and a wide range of traits, including immunological, dermatological, neurological, psychiatric and reproductive diseases," said John Capra, senior author of the paper "The phenotypic legacy of admixture between modern humans and Neanderthals" published in the Feb. 12 issue of the journal Science. The evolutionary geneticist is an assistant professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University.

Some of the associations that Capra and his colleagues found confirm previous hypotheses. One example is the proposal that Neanderthal DNA affects cells called keratinocytes that help protect the skin from environmental damage such as ultraviolet radiation and pathogens. The new analysis found Neanderthal DNA variants influence skin biology in modern humans, in particular the risk of developing sun-induced skin lesions called keratosis, which are caused by abnormal keratinocytes.

In addition, there were a number of surprises. For example, they found that a specific bit of Neanderthal DNA significantly increases risk for nicotine addiction. They also found a number of variants that influence the risk for depression: some positively and some negatively. In fact, a surprisingly number of snippets of Neanderthal DNA were associated with psychiatric and neurological effects, the study found.

"The brain is incredibly complex, so it's reasonable to expect that introducing changes from a different evolutionary path might have negative consequences," said Vanderbilt doctoral student Corinne Simonti, the paper's first author.

According to the researchers, the pattern of associations that they discovered suggest that today's population retains Neanderthal DNA that may have provided modern humans with adaptive advantages 40,000 years ago as they migrated into new non-African environments with different pathogens and levels of sun exposure. However, many of these traits may no longer be advantageous in modern environments.

One example is a Neanderthal variant that increases blood coagulation. It could have helped our ancestors cope with new pathogens encountered in new environments by sealing wounds more quickly and preventing pathogens from entering the body. In modern environments this variant has become detrimental, because hypercoagulation increases risk for stroke, pulmonary embolism and pregnancy complications.

In order to discover these associations, the researchers used a database containing 28,000 patients whose biological samples have been linked to anonymized versions of their electronic health records. The data came from eMERGE - the Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute - which links digitized records from Vanderbilt University Medical Center's BioVU databank and eight other hospitals around the country.

This data allowed the researchers to determine if each individual had ever been treated for a specific set of medical conditions, such as heart disease, arthritis or depression. Next they analyzed the genomes of each individual to identify the unique set of Neanderthal DNA that each person carried. By comparing the two sets of data, they could test whether each bit of Neanderthal DNA individually and in aggregate influences risk for the traits derived from the medical records.

"Vanderbilt's BioVU and the network of similar databanks from hospitals across the country were built to enable discoveries about the genetic basis of disease," said Capra. "We realized that we could use them to answer important questions about human evolution."

According to the evolutionary geneticist, this work establishes a new way to investigate questions about the effects of events in recent human evolution.

The current study was limited to associating Neanderthal DNA variants with physical traits (phenotypes) included in hospital billing codes, but there is a lot of other information contained in the medical records, such as lab tests, doctors' notes, and medical images, that Capra is working on analyzing in a similar fashion.
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Reference:

Phys.org. 2016. “Neanderthal DNA has subtle but significant impact on human traits”. Phys.org. Posted: February 11, 2016. Available online: http://phys.org/news/2016-02-neanderthal-dna-subtle-significant-impact.html

Human hunting weapons may not have caused the demise of the Neanderthals

Technological innovation may not have led to the colonization of Europe by anatomically modern humans, suggests new study

The demise of Neanderthals may have nothing to do with innovative hunting weapons carried by humans from west Asia, according to a new study published in the Journal of Human Evolution. The researchers, from Nagoya University and The University of Tokyo, Japan, say their findings mean that we may need to rethink the reasons humans survived Neanderthals - and that we may not have behaved as differently as we thought.

The researchers looked at innovative stone weapons used by humans about 42,000-34,000 years ago. Traditionally, anthropologists believed that innovation in weapons enabled humans to spread out of Africa to Europe. However, the new study suggests that the innovation was not a driving force for humans to migrate into Europe as previously thought - they were no better equipped than the Neanderthals.

"We're not so special, I don't think we survived Neanderthals simply because of technological competence," said Dr. Seiji Kadowaki, first author of the study from Nagoya University, Japan. "Our work is related to the processes behind the global spread of modern humans, and specifically the cultural impact of the modern humans who migrated to Europe."

Anatomically modern humans expanded the geographic area they inhabited out of Africa during a period of time 55,000-40,000 years ago - this event made a huge impact on the biological origin of people living today. There are other theories for the geographical spread of anatomically modern humans, but this is generally accepted as a major event in human history.

Previous models assumed that anatomically modern humans - our direct ancestors - were special in the way they behaved and thought. These models considered technological and cultural innovation as the reason humans survived and Neanderthals did not.

There has always been a big question around the demise of the Neanderthals - why did they disappear when humans survived? We have a similar anatomy, so researchers traditionally thought there must have been differences in the way Neanderthals and humans behaved. The new study suggests that humans moved from west Asia to Europe without a big change in their behavior.

The researchers studied stone tools that were used by people in the Early Ahmarian culture and the Protoaurignacian culture, living in south and west Europe and west Asia around 40,000 years ago. They used small stone points as tips for hunting weapons like throwing spears. Researchers previously considered these to be a significant innovation - one that helped the humans migrate from west Asia to Europe, where Neanderthals were living.

However, the new research reveals a timeline that doesn't support this theory. If the innovation had led to the migration, evidence would show the stone points moving in the same direction as the humans. But at closer inspection, the researchers showed the possibility that the stone points appeared in Europe 3,000 years earlier than in the Levant, a historical area in west Asia. Innovation in hunting weapons can be necessary, but it's not always associated with migration - populations can spread without technological innovations.

"We looked at the basic timeline revealed by similar stone points, and it shows that humans were using them in Europe before they appeared in the Levant - the opposite of what we'd expect if the innovation had led to the humans' migration from Africa to Europe," said Dr. Kadowaki.

"Our new findings mean that the research community now needs to reconsider the assumption that our ancestors moved to Europe and succeeded where Neanderthals failed because of cultural and technological innovations brought from Africa or west Asia."

By re-examining the evidence, the researchers showed that the comparable stone weapons appeared in Europe around 42,000 years ago, and in the Levant 39,000 years ago. They believe the timings imply several new scenarios about the migration of modern humans into Europe. For example, they are likely to have migrated to Europe much earlier, and developed the tools there.

"We're very excited about our new model. We think the causes of human evolution are more complicated than just being about technology. Now that we've re-examined the traditional model about the northern migration route to Europe, we are planning to re-evaluate the model on the southern migration route - from East Africa to South Asia" said Dr. Kadowaki.
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Reference:

EurekAlert. 2015. “Human hunting weapons may not have caused the demise of the Neanderthals”. EurekAlert. Posted: April 28, 2015. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-04/e-hhw042815.php

Neandertals modified white-tailed eagle claws 130,000 years ago

Krapina Neandertals may have manipulated white-tailed eagle talons to make jewelry 130,000 years ago, before the appearance of modern human in Europe, according to a study published March 11, 2015 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by David Frayer from University of Kansas and colleagues from Croatia.

Researchers describe eight mostly complete white-tailed eagle talons from the Krapina Neandertal site in present-day Croatia, dating to approximately 130,000 years ago. These white-tailed eagle bones, discovered more than 100 years ago, all derive from a single time period at Krapina. Four talons bear multiple edge-smoothed cut marks, and eight show polishing facets or abrasion. Three of the largest talons have small notches at roughly the same place along the plantar surface.

The authors suggest these features may be part of a jewelry assemblage, like mounting the talons in a necklace or bracelet. Some have argued that Neandertals lacked symbolic ability or copied this behavior from modern humans, but the presence of the talons indicates that the Krapina Neandertals may have acquired eagle talons for some kind of symbolic purpose. They also demonstrate that the Krapina Neandertals may have made jewelry 80,000 years before the appearance of modern humans in Europe.

"It's really a stunning discovery. It's one of those things that just appeared out of the blue. It's so unexpected and it's so startling because there's just nothing like it until very recent times to find this kind of jewelry," David Frayer said.
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Reference:

EurekAlert. 2015. “Neandertals modified white-tailed eagle claws 130,000 years ago”. EurekAlert. Posted: March 11, 2015. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-03/p-nmw030915.php

Talking Neanderthals challenge the origins of speech

We humans like to think of ourselves as unique for many reasons, not least of which being our ability to communicate with words. But ground-breaking research by an expert from the University of New England shows that our 'misunderstood cousins,' the Neanderthals, may well have spoken in languages not dissimilar to the ones we use today.

Pinpointing the origin and evolution of speech and human language is one of the longest running and most hotly debated topics in the scientific world. It has long been believed that other beings, including the Neanderthals with whom our ancestors shared Earth for thousands of years, simply lacked the necessary cognitive capacity and vocal hardware for speech.

Associate Professor Stephen Wroe, a zoologist and palaeontologist from UNE, along with an international team of scientists and the use of 3D x-ray imaging technology, made the revolutionary discovery challenging this notion based on a 60,000 year-old Neanderthal hyoid bone discovered in Israel in 1989.

"To many, the Neanderthal hyoid discovered was surprising because its shape was very different to that of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzee and the bonobo. However, it was virtually indistinguishable from that of our own species. This led to some people arguing that this Neanderthal could speak," A/Professor Wroe said.

"The obvious counterargument to this assertion was that the fact that hyoids of Neanderthals were the same shape as modern humans doesn't necessarily mean that they were used in the same way. With the technology of the time, it was hard to verify the argument one way or the other."

However advances in 3D imaging and computer modelling allowed A/Professor Wroe's team to revisit the question.

"By analysing the mechanical behaviour of the fossilised bone with micro x-ray imaging, we were able to build models of the hyoid that included the intricate internal structure of the bone. We then compared them to models of modern humans. Our comparisons showed that in terms of mechanical behaviour, the Neanderthal hyoid was basically indistinguishable from our own, strongly suggesting that this key part of the vocal tract was used in the same way.

"From this research, we can conclude that it's likely that the origins of speech and language are far, far older than once thought."
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References:

Science Daily. 2014. “Talking Neanderthals challenge the origins of speech”. Science Daily. Posted: March 2, 2014. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140302185241.htm

Ancient Humans Had Sex with Mystery Relatives, Study Suggests

A new, improved sequencing of ancient human relative genomes reveals that Homo sapiens didn't only have sex with Neanderthals and a little-understood line of humans called Denisovans. A fourth, mystery lineage of humans was in the mix, too.

As reported by the news arm of the journal Nature, new genetic evidence suggests that several hominids — human relatives closer than humans' current living cousin, the chimpanzee — interbred more than 30,000 years ago. This group of kissing cousins included an unknown human ancestor not yet revealed by the ancient DNA record.

"It's implied it could be something like Homo erectus or similar," said Carles Lalueza-Fox, a paleogenomics researcher at Pompeu Fabra University in Spain, who was not involved in the research, but who was present at a talk on the findings given by lead author David Reich of Harvard Medical School at a meeting on ancient DNA sponsored by the Royal Society in London on Nov. 18. Homo erectus is an extinct species of human that originated in Africa and spread into Asia.

Ancient human lineages

Neanderthals are an extinct group of humans who lived between about 30,000 and 130,000 years ago. Despite their reputation as bone-headed dummies, Neanderthals were likely as advanced as modern humans in areas such as tool-making, though they were probably less socially adept.

Denisovans are a far more mysterious group. These early humans lived in Siberia and probably split off from the branch of the human family tree that would eventually give rise to Neanderthals about 300,000 years ago. Little is known about how Denisovans lived and what they looked like.

But genetic analyses of Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans suggest the three groups occasionally had sex and produced offspring. Denisovan genes show up in modern Pacific Islanders and in people from Southeast Asia and southern China. Neanderthal genes appear in 1 to 4 percent of modern Eurasian people, suggesting that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals interbred after modern humans trekked out of Africa.

For unknown reasons, Homo sapiens are the only human survivors, as all others in the Homo genus eventually went extinct.

New genomes, new discoveries

The new research has been submitted to a scientific journal for publication. Under the journal's rules, lead author Reich cannot speak to the news media about the study until the paper comes out.

A Nature News reporter who attended the Nov. 18 talk, however, reports that Reich and his colleagues have created much more complete sequences of the Denisovan and Neanderthal genomes than those used in previous research.

The sequences confirmed previous findings that Denisovans mated with the ancestors of Pacific Islanders and East Asians, but also revealed a surprise: Genetic traces of an unknown population of human ancestors were found in the Denisovan gene, suggesting even more interbreeding than previously expected. Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London, described the ancient environment to Nature as a "'Lord of the Rings'-type world" with many human populations living side-by-side.

Lalueza-Fox said the question of the mystery fourth ancestor is a "paleontological debate," but that the genetic work done by Reich and his colleagues opens the door to a deeper understanding of the individual diversity of ancient human ancestors. New techniques will enable researchers to tease out original DNA from later contaminants, he said.

"Some samples that were considered not suitable for genomic approaches are now going to be good samples," Lalueza-Fox said.

In the past, Lalueza-Fox said, geneticists were stuck trying to extrapolate details about human evolution from modern human DNA. Now, he said, they can go directly to the ancient DNA.

"We have been trying to understand human evolution from the study of modern human genomes, but clearly we missed part of the picture, which is now emerging from ancient hominin genomes," Lalueza-Fox said.
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References:

Pappas, Stephanie. 2014. “Ancient Humans Had Sex with Mystery Relatives, Study Suggests”. Live Science. Posted: December 2, 2013. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/41610-ancient-human-sex.html

Did Neandertals have language?

A recent study suggest that Neandertals shared speech and language with modern humans

Fast-accumulating data seem to indicate that our close cousins, the Neandertals, were much more similar to us than imagined even a decade ago. But did they have anything like modern speech and language? And if so, what are the implications for understanding present-day linguistic diversity? The MPI for Psycholinguistics researchers Dan Dediu and Stephen C. Levinson argue in their paper in Frontiers in Language Sciences that modern language and speech can be traced back to the last common ancestor we shared with the Neandertals roughly half a million years ago.

The Neandertals have fascinated both the academic world and the general public ever since their discovery almost 200 years ago. Initially thought to be subhuman brutes incapable of anything but the most primitive of grunts, they were a successful form of humanity inhabiting vast swathes of western Eurasia for several hundreds of thousands of years, during harsh ages and milder interglacial periods. We knew that they were our closest cousins, sharing a common ancestor with us around half a million years ago (probably Homo heidelbergensis), but it was unclear what their cognitive capacities were like, or why modern humans succeeded in replacing them after thousands of years of cohabitation. Recently, due to new palaeoanthropological and archaeological discoveries and the reassessment of older data, but especially to the availability of ancient DNA, we have started to realise that their fate was much more intertwined with ours and that, far from being slow brutes, their cognitive capacities and culture were comparable to ours.

Dediu and Levinson review all these strands of literature and argue that essentially modern language and speech are an ancient feature of our lineage dating back at least to the most recent ancestor we shared with the Neandertals and the Denisovans (another form of humanity known mostly from their genome). Their interpretation of the intrinsically ambiguous and scant evidence goes against the scenario usually assumed by most language scientists, namely that of a sudden and recent emergence of modernity, presumably due to a single – or very few – genetic mutations. This pushes back the origins of modern language by a factor of 10 from the often-cited 50 or so thousand years, to around a million years ago – somewhere between the origins of our genus, Homo, some 1.8 million years ago, and the emergence of Homo heidelbergensis. This reassessment of the evidence goes against a saltationist scenario where a single catastrophic mutation in a single individual would suddenly give rise to language, and suggests that a gradual accumulation of biological and cultural innovations is much more plausible.

Interestingly, given that we know from the archaeological record and recent genetic data that the modern humans spreading out of Africa interacted both genetically and culturally with the Neandertals and Denisovans, then just as our bodies carry around some of their genes, maybe our languages preserve traces of their languages too. This would mean that at least some of the observed linguistic diversity is due to these ancient encounters, an idea testable by comparing the structural properties of the African and non-African languages, and by detailed computer simulations of language spread.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2013. “Did Neandertals have language?”. EurekAlert. Posted: July 9, 2013. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-07/m-dnh070913.php

Neanderthal culture: Old masters

The earliest known cave paintings fuel arguments about whether Neanderthals were the mental equals of modern humans.

In a damp Spanish cave, Alistair Pike applies a small grinder to the world's oldest known paintings. Every few minutes, the dentist-drill sound stops and Pike, an archaeologist from the University of Southampton, UK, stands aside so that a party of tourists can admire the simple artwork — hazy red disks, stencilled handprints, the outlines of bison — daubed on the cave wall tens of thousands of years ago. He hopes that the visitors won't notice the small scuff marks he has left.

In fact, Pike's grinder — and the scalpel that he wields to scrape off tiny samples — is doing no harm to the actual paintings, and he is working with the full approval of the Spanish authorities. Pike is after the crust of calcite that has built up over the millennia from groundwater dripping down the wall. The white flecks that he dislodges hold a smattering of uranium atoms, whose decay acts as a radioactive clock. A clock that has been ticking ever since the calcite formed on top of the art.

The results of an earlier round of sampling in El Castillo cave, published last June¹, showed that the oldest of the paintings, a simple red spot, dates to at least 40,800 years ago, roughly when the first modern humans reached western Europe. Pike and his colleagues think that when they analyse the latest samples, the paintings may turn out to be older still, perhaps by thousands of years — too old to have been made by modern humans. If so, the artists must have been Neanderthals, the brawny, archaic people who were already living in Europe.

The answer won't be known for at least a year, but if it favours the Neanderthals, it could tip — if not resolve — a debate that has rumbled for decades: did the Neanderthals, once caricatured as brute cavemen, have minds like our own, capable of abstract thinking, symbolism and even art? It is one of the most haunting questions about the people who once shared a continent with us, then mysteriously vanished.

An early date for the paintings would also be a vindication for the slight, dark-haired man watching as Pike works: João Zilhão, who has emerged as the leading advocate for Neanderthals, relentlessly pressing the case that these ice-age Europeans were our cognitive equals. Zilhão, an archaeologist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies at the University of Barcelona in Spain, believes that other signs of sophisticated Neanderthal culture have already proved his point. But he is willing to debate on his opponents' terms. “To my mind, we don't need that evidence,” he says of the paintings. “But I guess for many of my colleagues this would be the smoking gun.”

The front line in the Neanderthal wars runs through another cave: Grotte du Renne, 1,000 kilometres away in central France. As early as the 1950s, excavations there unearthed a collection of puzzling artefacts. Among them were bone awls, distinctive stone blades and palaeolithic baubles — the teeth of animals such as foxes or marmots, grooved or pierced so that they could be worn on a string. They were buried beneath artefacts typical of the first modern humans in Europe, suggesting that these objects were older. A startling possibility loomed: that artefacts of this style, collectively known as the Châtelperronian industry, were made by Neanderthals.

Close cousins of modern humans, Neanderthals evolved in western Eurasia and had Europe to themselves for more than 200,000 years, enduring several ice ages. In spite of their survival skills and big brains — comparable to our own — they had never been linked to sophisticated tools of this kind, or to ornaments. Yet in 1980, archaeologists reported finding a Neanderthal skeleton among Châtelperronian tools at another site in France². And in 1996, French palaeoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin and his colleagues reported that a skull fragment from the ornament layer in the Grotte du Renne was unmistakably Neanderthal³.

Ever since then, the Grotte du Renne has been exhibit A in the case that Neanderthals, like ourselves, trafficked in symbols, using ornaments as badges of identity for individuals or groups.

Hublin himself did not go that far. He suggested that the Neanderthals had fallen under the spell of strange new neighbours: modern humans, who were thought to have reached Europe around the time of the Châtelperronian industry. Neanderthals might have acquired the ice-age bling from modern humans, or made the pendants themselves under the influence of the new arrivals.

That conclusion infuriated Zilhão, turning him into the passionate advocate he is today. He questioned the evidence that modern humans were already on the scene and detected a bias against our extinct cousins. “Why was the equally if not more legitimate hypothesis — that the Neanderthals themselves had been the authors of this stuff and made it for their own use — not even considered?” asks Zilhão.

On a visit to rock-art sites in Portugal, he discussed the paper with Francesco d'Errico, an archaeologist who is now at the University of Bordeaux in France. D'Errico had the same reaction, Zilhão recalls. “And he said: 'OK, let's do something about it.'” Since then, the pair has fought a two-front war, advancing evidence for Neanderthal capabilities while challenging studies that reserve symbolism and abstract thinking for modern humans.

Unknown artists

More than 15 years later, the Grotte du Renne continues to be a battleground. Since 2010, three papers have given duelling interpretations of the artefact-bearing layers. In the first, a group led by dating expert Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford, UK, used new carbon dates to argue that the layers were scrambled, mixing older remains with younger⁴. If that was correct, said Higham's team, the relics adjacent to the telltale skull fragment might not have belonged to Neanderthals after all.

Within months, Zilhão, d'Errico and their colleagues fired back with an analysis⁵ of how artefacts of different types were distributed in the Grotte du Renne, concluding that the layers were undisturbed and that the Neanderthal link could be trusted. A group led by Hublin (now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany) presented its own dates last year, backing Zilhão's claim⁶. But Hublin still denied the Neanderthals full credit. Neanderthals did make the objects, now dated to between 45,000 and 40,000 years ago, he said — but only after they encountered modern humans. And this time he had fresh evidence to draw on.

Carbon dates measured by Higham and others at caves in Italy, Britain and Germany suggest that modern humans began expanding into Europe as early as 45,000 years ago, several thousand years earlier than was thought (see Nature 485, 27–29; 2012). Zilhão strenuously disputes those claims, doubting whether the shells or animal bones used for dating truly reflect the age of the human fossils at the sites, or whether the human remains are modern. “The evidence to show an early presence of modern humans in Europe is worse today than it was 20 years ago,” he declares.

Hublin, however, has no doubt that our ancestors had already entered the picture when Neanderthals in France began making bone awls and animal-tooth pendants. To assume that Neanderthals invented these technologies on their own is to accept “an incredible coincidence”, he says. “Just as modern humans arrive with these things in their pocket — bingo!”

Like minds

Despite the stalemate, Zilhão says that the record of Neanderthal behaviour tens of thousands of years before modern humans arrived in Europe proves his point. Neanderthals are believed to have buried their dead, suggesting that they had some kind of spirituality. They made glue for securing spear points by heating birch sap while protecting it from the air, a feat that even modern experimental archaeologists have trouble replicating. Many Neanderthal sites include lumps of pigment — red ochre and black manganese — that sometimes seem to be worn down like stone-age crayons. Zilhão and others think that the Neanderthals painted themselves, creating striking patterns on their pale, northern skin that were every bit as symbolic as the art and ornaments of modern humans.

“You don't need to have shell beads, you don't need to have artefacts with graphical representation to have behaviour that can be defined archaeologically as symbolic,” he says. “Burying your dead is symbolic behaviour. Making sophisticated chemical compounds in order to haft your stone tools implies a capacity to think in abstract ways, a capacity to plan ahead, that's fundamentally similar to ours.”

Where Zilhão sees a clear pattern, sceptics see uncertainties. Harold Dibble, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, is re-examining supposed Neanderthal burial sites. At one, the French cave of Roc de Marsal, he says that what seemed to be a deliberately excavated grave is actually a natural pit. At another, La Ferrassie, he sees evidence that sediments swept into the cave by water — not grieving kin — could have buried Neanderthal remains.

As for the ochre crayons, Dibble is dismissive. “You see some wear on a piece of ochre and soon you've got Neanderthal body painting,” he says. “What a lot of logical leaps.” He and others say that the pigment has many possible uses: as an insect repellent, a preservative for food or animal skins, an ingredient in adhesives. Even Wil Roebroeks of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, who found evidence for ochre use as early as 250,000 years ago at a Dutch Neanderthal site⁷, says that Zilhão “jumps too fast from the presence of ochre to body decoration”.

Ask Dibble, Hublin and other sceptics what would persuade them that Neanderthals had minds like ours, and their answer is simple: a pattern of art or other sophisticated symbolic expression from a time when no modern humans could possibly have been around. “But I don't think it exists,” says Hublin.

Zilhão, however, points to a singular finding from a Neanderthal site in southern Spain that he reported three years ago⁸: three cockle shells each with holes near one edge, as if they had been worn as ornaments. One contains a trace of red pigment, and a fourth shell is stained with a mixture of colours, as if it had been used as a paint container. The shells, says Zilhão, imply symbolic thinking fully equivalent to that of the modern humans who left troves of beads in South Africa 75,000 years ago. And at roughly 50,000 years old, he says, the Spanish shells date from a time well before modern humans reached the region.

Critics are not satisfied. The perforations are natural, as Zilhão himself noted, which suggests to Hublin and Dibble that rather than systematically fashioning ornaments, Neanderthals might have picked up a few odd shells on a whim. “When you've got isolated occurrences, one-offs, that's not going to convince most of us,” says Dibble.

The paintings in El Castillo could help to establish a pattern. The research group was conservative with the ages it reported last June¹, which put the earliest calcite at nearly 41,000 years old. Nervous about damaging the pigment, the team left several millimetres of the veneer intact at each sampled spot. Deeper, older layers might push back the paintings' minimum ages by several thousand years.

That prospect brought the team back to El Castillo last October. Grinding and scraping through a long day, the researchers concentrate on the red disks and hand stencils that had yielded the earliest dates last time around. The goal, says Zilhão, is “to date pigments in these paintings to an age that is clearly and to everyone's satisfaction beyond the range of modern humans in Europe”.

Yet an early date may not settle the long-running dispute. Hublin sets the bar high. “If Zilhão finds a date of earlier than 50,000 years ago, I'll be convinced!” he says. Any younger, and modern human influence would remain a possibility, he says, noting recent hints that our ancestors had advanced into Turkey or even central Europe by 50,000 years ago. And one example of crude painting — what Dibble calls “Neanderthal doodling” — might not be enough to win over the doubters. Zilhão's knockout blow may simply lead to more fighting.

Yet signs of a middle ground are emerging. Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, says that 20 years ago, he believed that if the Neanderthals made the Châtelperronian ornaments, they were blindly imitating modern humans. “Our interpretation was that they were copying but that they didn't have the brainpower to give full value” to the objects. He wouldn't say so now. Two decades of discoveries of sophisticated Neanderthal tools and weapons have made him think that “the gulf was not as great”: that the difference between Neanderthals and ourselves was a matter more of culture than of ability.

“You can see the Neanderthals were held back by various factors that were not down to their brains,” he adds. The climate of ice-age Europe kept their population size “frighteningly small”, he says — at times just a few thousand people across a whole continent, most of them dead by the age of 30. How could such a sparse, beleaguered people develop and sustain a sophisticated culture?

That's not so different from what d'Errico, Zilhão's comrade-in-arms for almost 20 years, now says. He still thinks that the Neanderthals probably invented the Châtelperronian artefacts before modern humans were on the scene. But he is open to the idea that aspects of modern human culture preceded their wholesale arrival in Europe. “It's possible that some influence did spread,” says d'Errico. “I'm less militant than João.” That takes nothing away from the Neanderthals, he adds. “The fact that Neanderthals can absorb influences, can re-elaborate them, can make them part of their own culture, is very modern behaviour.”

But there is a final stretch of ground that neither side will concede. Were the Neanderthals truly the same as us, cognitively? No, says Stringer. The Neanderthal genome, decoded⁹ in 2010, differs from that of modern humans in some regions linked to brain function, he notes. And this year, he suggested that, compared with modern humans, larger volumes of Neanderthals' brains were devoted to vision and to controlling their heavier bodies¹⁰ . That might have left them with less capacity for social awareness and interaction. “If you imagine a Neanderthal in modern society, there would still be differences,” says Stringer.

Zilhão rejects any distinctions. Emerging from the cave into a rainy evening, he muses that if he pushes back the age of the El Castillo paintings, his critics may argue that he has simply proved an earlier presence of modern humans in Europe. “To which I will say, 'Of course. Neanderthals were modern humans too.'”
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References:

Appenzeller, Tim. 2013. “Neanderthal culture: Old masters”. Nature. Posted: May 15, 2013. Available online: http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthal-culture-old-masters-1.12974 Article References:

Nature 497, 302–304 (16 May 2013) doi:10.1038/497302a

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2. Lévêque, F. & Vandermeersch, B. C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris 291, 187–189 (1980).
3. Hublin, J.-J., Spoor, F., Braun, M., Zonneveld, F. & Condemi, S. Nature 381, 224–226 (1996).
4. Higham, T. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 107, 20234–20239 (2010).
5. Caron, F., d'Errico, F., Del moral, P., Santos, F. & Zilhão, J. PLoS ONE 6, e21545 (2011).
6. Hublin, J.-J. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 109, 18743–18748 (2012).
7. Roebroeks, W. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 109, 1889–1894 (2012).
8. Zilhão, J. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 107, 1023–1028 (2010).
9. Green, R. E. et al. Science 328, 710–722 (2010).
10. Pearce, E., Stringer, C. & Dunbar, R. I. M. Proc. R. Soc. B 280, 20130168 (2013).

First Love Child of Human, Neanderthal Found

The skeletal remains of an individual living in northern Italy 40,000-30,000 years ago are believed to be that of a human/Neanderthal hybrid, according to a paper in PLoS ONE.

If further analysis proves the theory correct, the remains belonged to the first known such hybrid, providing direct evidence that humans and Neanderthals interbred. Prior genetic research determined the DNA of people with European and Asian ancestry is 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal.

The present study focuses on the individual’s jaw, which was unearthed at a rock-shelter called Riparo di Mezzena in the Monti Lessini region of Italy. Both Neanderthals and modern humans inhabited Europe at the time.

“From the morphology of the lower jaw, the face of the Mezzena individual would have looked somehow intermediate between classic Neanderthals, who had a rather receding lower jaw (no chin), and the modern humans, who present a projecting lower jaw with a strongly developed chin,” co-author Silvana Condemi, an anthropologist, told Discovery News.

Condemi is the CNRS research director at the University of Ai-Marseille. She and her colleagues studied the remains via DNA analysis and 3D imaging. They then compared those results with the same features from Homo sapiens.

The genetic analysis shows that the individual’s mitochondrial DNA is Neanderthal. Since this DNA is transmitted from a mother to her child, the researchers conclude that it was a “female Neanderthal who mated with male Homo sapiens.”

By the time modern humans arrived in the area, the Neanderthals had already established their own culture, Mousterian, which lasted some 200,000 years. Numerous flint tools, such as axes and spear points, have been associated with the Mousterian. The artifacts are typically found in rock shelters, such as the Riparo di Mezzena, and caves throughout Europe.

The researchers found that, although the hybridization between the two hominid species likely took place, the Neanderthals continued to uphold their own cultural traditions.

That's an intriguing clue, because it suggests that the two populations did not simply meet, mate and merge into a single group.

As Condemi and her colleagues wrote, the mandible supports the theory of "a slow process of replacement of Neanderthals by the invading modern human populations, as well as additional evidence of the upholding of the Neanderthals' cultural identity.”

Prior fossil finds indicate that modern humans were living in a southern Italy cave as early as 45,000 years ago. Modern humans and Neanderthals therefore lived in roughly the same regions for thousands of years, but the new human arrivals, from the Neanderthal perspective, might not have been welcome, and for good reason. The research team hints that the modern humans may have raped female Neanderthals, bringing to mind modern cases of "ethnic cleansing."

Ian Tattersall is one of the world’s leading experts on Neanderthals and the human fossil record. He is a paleoanthropologist and a curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History.

Tattersall told Discovery News that the hypothesis, presented in the new paper, “is very intriguing and one that invites more research.”

Neanderthal culture and purebred Neanderthals all died out 35,000-30,000 years ago.
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References:

Viegas, Jennifer. 2013. “First Love Child of Human, Neanderthal Found”. Discovery News. Posted: March 27, 2013. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/human/evolution/neanderthal-skeleton-provides-evidence-of-interbreeding-with-humans-130327.htm

Homo heidelbergensis was only slightly taller than the Neanderthal

The reconstruction of 27 complete human limb bones found in Atapuerca (Burgos, Spain) has helped to determine the height of various species of the Pleistocene era. Homo heidelbergensis, like Neanderthals, were similar in height to the current population of the Mediterranean.

Along with its enormous quantity of fossils, one of the most important features of the Sima de los Huesos (SH) site in Atapuerca, Burgos, is the splendid state of the findings. They are so well conserved that the 27 complete bones from some 500,000 years ago have been reconstructed.

"The incredible collection allows us to estimate the height of species such as Homo heidelbergensis, who inhabited Europe during the Middle Pleistocene era and is the ancestor of the Neanderthal. Such estimations are based solely on analysis of the large complete bones, like those from the arm and the leg," as explained to SINC by José Miguel Carretero Díaz, researcher at the Laboratory of Human Evolution of the University of Burgos and lead author of the study that has been published in the 'Journal of Human Evolution' journal.

In addition, since bones were complete, the researchers were able to determine whether they belonged to a male or female and thus calculate the height of both men and women. "Estimations to date were based on incomplete bone samples, the length of which had to be estimated too. We also used to use formulas based on just one reference population and we were not even sure as to its appropriateness," outlines the researcher.

Since the most fitting race or ecology for these human beings was unknown, scientists used multiracial and multigender formulas to estimate the height for the entire population in order to reduce the error margin and get a closer insight on the reality. As Carretero Díaz points out, "we calculated an overall average for the sample and one for each of the sexes. The same was done with the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon fossils."

The results suggest that both men and women in the Sima de los Huesos population were on average slightly higher than Neanderthal men and women. "Neither can be described as being short and both are placed in the medium and above-medium height categories. But, both species featured tall individuals," assured the experts.

The height of these two species is similar to that of modern day population of mid-latitudes, like in the case of Central Europe and the Mediterranean.

The humans who arrived in Europe during the Upper Palaeolithic era, Cro-Magnons or anatomically modern humans, replaced the Neanderthal populations. They were significantly taller than other human species and their average height for both sexes was higher, falling in the very tall individual category.

Height remained the same for some 2 million years

According to the researchers, putting aside the margin corresponding to small biotype species like Homo habilis (East Africa), Homo georgicus (Georgia) and Homo floresiensis (Flores in Indonesia), all documented humans during the Early and Middle Pleistocene Era that inhabited Africa (Homo ergaster, Homo rhodesiensis), Asia (Homo erectus) and Europe (Homo antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis and Homo neanderthalensis) seemed to have medium and above-medium heights for the most part of two millions years. However, the researchers state that "amongst every population we have found a tall or very tall individual."

In their opinion, this suggests that the height of the Homo genus remained more or less stable for 2 million years until the appearance of a "ground-breaking species in this sense" in Africa just 200,000 years ago. These were the Homo sapiens, who were initially significantly taller than any other species that existed at the time.

"The explanation is found in the overall morphological change in the body biotype that prevailed in our species compared to our ancestors. The Homo sapiens had a slimmer body, lighter bones, longer legs and were taller," adds the researcher.

A lighter body aided survival

Scientists have documented various advantages that made the sapiens biotype more adaptable. These include their thermoregulatory, obstetric and nutritional make-up but in the eyes of the experts, the greatest advantage of this new body type was increased endurance and energy.

Carretero Díaz indicates that "larger legs, narrower hips, being taller and having lighter bones not only meant a reduction in body weight (less muscular fat) but a bigger stride, greater speed and a lower energy cost when moving the body, walking or running."

This type of anatomy could have been highly advantageous in terms of survival in Eurasia during the Upper Pleistocene Era when two intelligent human species (the light-bodied Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals) had to face difficult climatic conditions, drastic changes in ecosystems and ecological competition.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2012. "Homo heidelbergensis was only slightly taller than the Neanderthal". EurekAlert. Posted: June 6, 2012. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-06/f-sf-hhw060612.php

Top 10 Hominid Discoveries of 2011

10. Earliest Modern Humans in Europe: Paleoanthropologists believe modern humans (Homo sapiens) came to Europe about 43,000 years ago. This date is based on the age of sophisticated stone tools, not human fossils. This year two teams dated European fossils that are in line with the age of the tools: A human upper jaw discovered in southern England in 1927 was dated to 44,000 years ago, and two molars unearthed in Italy were dated to 45,000 years ago. These fossils are the oldest known human remains on the continent.

9. The Arches of Australopithecus afarensis: There’s no doubt that Lucy and her species, Australopithecus afarensis, walked upright. But the degree to which these hominids walked on the ground has been debated. The discovery of a 3.2-million-year-old foot bone confirmed that Lucy and her kind had arched feet and therefore probably walked much like modern people. The researchers who studied the fossil say it indicates Australopithecus afarensis no longer needed to spend much time in the treetops; however, other researchers disagree, saying hominids at this time were still good tree climbers.

8. World’s Earliest Mattress: In a rock shelter in South Africa, archaeologists uncovered a 77,000-year-old mattress composed of thin layers of sedges and grasses, predating all other known mattresses by 50,000 years. Early humans knew how to keep the bed bugs out; the bedding was stuffed with leaves from the Cape Laurel tree (Cryptocarya woodii), which release chemicals known to kill mosquitos and other bugs.

7. Neanderthal Mountaineers: Neanderthals evolved many traits to deal with the cold; for example, their short limbs helped them conserve heat. A mathematical analysis revealed that short limbs may have also helped Neanderthals walk more efficiently in mountainous terrains. Specifically, the fact that Neanderthals had shorter shins relative to their thighs meant they didn’t need to lift their legs as high while walking uphill, compared to modern people with longer legs. “For a given step length, they [needed] to put in less effort,” said lead research Ryan Higgins of Johns Hopkins University.

6. The First Art Studio: Archaeologists working in South Africa’s Blombos Cave discovered early humans had a knack for chemistry. In a 100,000-year-old workshop, they found all of the raw materials needed to make paint, as well as abalone shells used as storage containers—evidence that our ancestors were capable of long-term planning at this time.

5. Australopithecine Females Strayed, Males Stayed Close to Home: In many monkey species, when males reach adolescence, they leave their home to search for a new group, probably as a way to avoid breeding with their female relatives. In chimpanzees and some humans, the opposite occurs: Females move away. Now it appears that australopithecines followed the chimp/human pattern. Researchers studied the composition of strontium isotopes found in the teeth of members of Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus. An individual consumes strontium through food and it is taken up by the teeth during childhood. Because the isotopes (different forms of the element) in plants and animals vary by geology and location, strontium can be used as a proxy for an individual’s location before adulthood. In the study, the researchers discovered that large individuals, presumably males, tended to have strontium isotope ratios typical of the area where the fossils were found; smaller individuals, or females, had non-local strontium isotope ratios, indicating they had moved into the area as adults.

4. Confirmation of Pre-Clovis People in North America: Since the 1930s, archaeologists have thought the Clovis people, known for their fluted projectile points, were the first people to arrive in the New World, about 13,000 years ago. But in recent years there have been hints that someone else got to North America first. The discovery of more than 15,000 stone artifacts in central Texas, dating to between 13,200 and 15,500 years ago, confirmed those suspicions. Corroborating evidence came from Washington State, where a mastodon rib containing a projectile point was dated this year to 13,800 years ago.

3. Denisovans Left A Mark in Modern DNA: The Denisovans lived in Eurasia sometime between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago. Scientists don’t know what they looked like; the only evidence of this extinct hominid group is DNA extracted from a bone fragment retrieved from a cave in Siberia. But this year, several studies revealed the mysterious population bred with several lineages of modern humans; people native to Southeast Asia, Australia, Melanesia, Polynesia and elsewhere in Oceania carry Denisovan DNA.

2. Out of Africa and Into Arabia: Traditionally, paleoanthropologists have thought modern humans left Africa through the Sinai Peninsula and into the Levant. But some researchers suggest our ancestors took a more southerly route, across the Red Sea and into southern Arabia. This year, several studies provided evidence pointing to this exit strategy. First, a team reported the discovery of 125,000-year-old stone tools in the United Arab Emirates. The researchers suggested humans ventured into Arabia when sea level was lower, making a trip across the Red Sea easier. (Geologists later verified the climate would have been just right at this time.) No fossils were found with the tools, but the scientists concluded they belonged to modern humans rather than Neanderthals or some other contemporaneous hominid. Another study this year complemented the finding: Paleoanthropologists also found stone tools, dating to 106,000 years ago, in Oman. The researchers say the artifacts match tools of the Nubian Complex, which are found only in the Horn of Africa. This connection implies the makers of those African tools, most likely modern humans, made the migration into Oman.

1. Australopithecus sediba, Candidate for Homo Ancestor: Last year, scientists announced the discovery of a new hominid species from South Africa’s Cradle of Humankind—Australopithecus sediba. This year, the researchers announced the results of an in-depth analysis of the 1.97-million-year-old species. They say a mix of australopithecine and Homo-like traits make Australopithecus sediba, or a species very similar to it, a possible direct ancestor of our own genus, Homo.

Erin Wayman writes the blog "Hominid Hunting" at the Smithsonian website. Visit the blog here to read more fascinating Hominid stories.
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References:

Wayman, Erin. 2012. "Top 10 Hominid Discoveries of 2011". Smithsonian Magazine. Posted: December 28, 2011. Available online: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/2011/12/top-10-hominid-discoveries-of-2011/

Shared Genes With Neanderthal Relatives: Modern East Asians Share Genetic Material With Prehistoric Denisovans

During human evolution our ancestors mated with Neanderthals, but also with other related hominids. In this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Uppsala University are publishing findings showing that people in East Asia share genetic material with Denisovans, who got the name from the cave in Siberia where they were first found.

"Our study covers a larger part of the world than earlier studies, and it is clear that it is not as simple as we previously thought. Hybridization took place at several points in evolution, and the genetic traces of this can be found in several places in the world. We'll probably be uncovering more events like these," says Mattias Jakobsson, who conducted the study together with Pontus Skoglund.

Previous studies have found two separate hybridization events between so-called archaic humans (different from modern humans in both genetics and morphology) and the ancestors of modern humans after their emergence from Africa: hybridization between Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans outside of Africa and hybridization between Denisovans and the ancestors of indigenous Oceanians. The genetic difference between Neandertals and Denisovans is roughly as great as the maximal level of variation among us modern humans.

The Uppsala scientists' study demonstrates that hybridization also occurred on the East Asian mainland. The connection was discovered by using genotype data in order to obtain a larger data set. Complete genomes of modern humans are only available from some dozen individuals today, whereas genotype data is available from thousands of individuals. These genetic data can be compared with genome sequences from Neandertals and a Denisovan which have been determined from archeological material. Only a pinky finger and a tooth have been described from the latter.

Genotype data stems from genetic research where hundreds of thousands of genetic variants from test panels are gathered on a chip. However, this process leads to unusual variants not being included, which can lead to biases if the material is treated as if it consisted of complete genomes. Skoglund and Jakobsson used advanced computer simulations to determine what this source of error means for comparisons with archaic genes and have thereby been able to use genetic data from more than 1,500 modern humans from all over the world.

"We found that individuals from mainly Southeast Asia have a higher proportion of Denisova-related genetic variants than people from other parts of the world, such as Europe, America, West and Central Asia, and Africa. The findings show that gene flow from archaic human groups also occurred on the Asian mainland," says Mattias Jakobsson.

"While we can see that genetic material of archaic humans lives on to a greater extent than what was previously thought, we still know very little about the history of these groups and when their contacts with modern humans occurred," says Pontus Skoglund.

Because they find Denisova-related gene variants in Southeast Asia and Oceania, but not in Europe and America, the researchers suggest that hybridization with Denisova man took place about 20,000-40,000 years ago, but could also have occurred earlier. This is long after the branch that became modern humans split off from the branch that led to Neandertals and Denisovans some 300,000-500,000 years ago.

"With more complete genomes from modern humans and more analyses of fossil material, it will be possible to describe our prehistory with considerably greater accuracy and richer detail," says Mattias Jakobsson.
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References:

Science Daily. 2011. "Shared Genes With Neanderthal Relatives: Modern East Asians Share Genetic Material With Prehistoric Denisovans". Science Daily. Posted: October 31, 2011. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/10/111031154119.htm

Journal Reference:

1. Pontus Skoglunda and Mattias Jakobssona. Archaic human ancestry in East Asia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1108181108

All Non-Africans Part Neanderthal, Genetics Confirm

If your heritage is non-African, you are part Neanderthal, according to a new study in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution. Discovery News has been reporting on human/Neanderthal interbreeding for some time now, so this latest research confirms earlier findings.

Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal's Department of Pediatrics and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center conducted the study with his colleagues. They determined some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals, but only in people of non-African heritage.

"This confirms recent findings suggesting that the two populations interbred," Labuda was quoted as saying in a press release. His team believes most, if not all, of the interbreeding took place in the Middle East, while modern humans were migrating out of Africa and spreading to other regions.

The ancestors of Neanderthals left Africa about 400,000 to 800,000 years ago. They evolved over the millennia mostly in what are now France, Spain, Germany and Russia. They went extinct, or were simply absorbed into the modern human population, about 30,000 years ago.

Neanderthals possessed the gene for language and had sophisticated music, art and tool craftsmanship skills, so they must have not been all that unattractive to modern humans at the time.

"In addition, because our methods were totally independent of Neanderthal material, we can also conclude that previous results were not influenced by contaminating artifacts," Labuda said.

This work goes back to nearly a decade ago, when Labuda and his colleagues identified a piece of DNA, called a haplotype, in the human X chromosome that seemed different. They questioned its origins.

Fast forward to 2010, when the Neanderthal genome was sequenced. The researchers could then compare the haplotype to the Neanderthal genome as well as to the DNA of existing humans. The scientists found that the sequence was present in people across all continents, except for sub-Saharan Africa, and including Australia.

"There is little doubt that this haplotype is present because of mating with our ancestors and Neanderthals," said Nick Patterson of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University. Patterson did not participate in the latest research. He added, "This is a very nice result, and further analysis may help determine more details."

David Reich, a Harvard Medical School geneticist, added, "Dr. Labuda and his colleagues were the first to identify a genetic variation in non-Africans that was likely to have come from an archaic population. This was done entirely without the Neanderthal genome sequence, but in light of the Neanderthal sequence, it is now clear that they were absolutely right!"

The modern human/Neanderthal combo likely benefitted our species, enabling it to survive in harsh, cold regions that Neanderthals previously had adapted to.

"Variability is very important for long-term survival of a species," Labuda concluded. "Every addition to the genome can be enriching."
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References:

Viegas, Jennifer. 2011. "All Non-Africans Part Neanderthal, Genetics Confirm". Discovery News. Posted: July 18, 2011. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/human/genetics-neanderthal-110718.html

Modern humans emerged far earlier than previously thought

An international team of researchers based at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, including a physical anthropology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has discovered well-dated human fossils in southern China that markedly change anthropologists perceptions of the emergence of modern humans in the eastern Old World.

The research was published Oct. 25 in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The discovery of early modern human fossil remains in the Zhirendong (Zhiren Cave) in south China that are at least 100,000 years old provides the earliest evidence for the emergence of modern humans in eastern Asia, at least 60,000 years older than the previously known modern humans in the region.

"These fossils are helping to redefine our perceptions of modern human emergence in eastern Eurasia, and across the Old World more generally," says Eric Trinkaus, PhD, the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor in Arts & Sciences and professor of physical anthropology.

The Zhirendong fossils have a mixture of modern and archaic features that contrasts with earlier modern humans in east Africa and southwest Asia, indicating some degree of human population continuity in Asia with the emergence of modern humans.

The Zhirendong humans indicate that the spread of modern human biology long preceded the cultural and technological innovations of the Upper Paleolithic and that early modern humans co-existed for many tens of millennia with late archaic humans further north and west across Eurasia.
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References:

EurekAlert. 2010. "Modern humans emerged far earlier than previously thought". EurekAlert. Posted: October 25, 2010. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-10/wuis-mhe102510.php

Volcanoes Killed Off Neanderthals, Study Suggests

Catastrophic volcanic eruptions in Europe may have culled Neanderthals to the point where they couldn't bounce back, according to a controversial new theory.

Modern humans, though, squeaked by, thanks to fallback populations in Africa and Asia, researchers say.

About 40,000 years ago in what we now call Italy and the Caucasus Mountains, which straddle Europe and Asia, several volcanoes erupted in quick succession, according to a new study to be published in the October issue of the journal Current Anthropology.

It's likely the eruptions reduced or wiped out local bands of Neanderthals and indirectly affected farther-flung populations, the team concluded after analyzing pollen and ash from the affected area. (See volcano pictures.)

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," said study team member Naomi Cleghorn. "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.

"This idea of an environmental cause for the Neanderthals' demise has been out in the literature. What we're trying to do is point out a specific mechanism," said Cleghorn, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, Arlington.

Other theories propose that modern humans played a vital role in the fall of the Neanderthals, either through competition, warfare, or interbreeding. (See "Neanderthals, Humans Interbred—First Solid DNA Evidence.")

If the volcanoes theory is correct, the Neanderthals' end was much more tragic: dying slowly in a cold and desolate landscape bereft of food sources.

"It's hard to say what it would have been like to be the last few groups out there, seeing other groups less and less over the years," Cleghorn said.

Uniquely Powerful Eruption

The Neanderthals were a hardy species that lived through multiple ice ages and would have been familiar with volcanoes and other natural calamities. But the eruptions 40,000 years ago were unlike anything Neanderthals had faced before, Cleghorn and company say.

For one thing, all the volcanoes apparently erupted around the same time. And one of those blasts, the Campanian Ignimbrite, is thought to have been the most powerful eruption in Europe in the last 200,000 years.

"It's much easier to adapt to something that's happening over a couple of generations," Cleghorn said. "You can move around, you can find other places to live, and your population can rebound.

"This is not that kind of event," she said. "This is unique."

Neanderthals Had Short Bench?

There may also have been small bands of Homo sapiens living in Europe at the time, Cleghorn said. They too would have been affected by the eruptions.

But modern humans likely avoided extinction because they had larger populations in Africa and Asia, she said, while most Neanderthals were in Europe around this time. (Related: "Neanderthals Ranged Much Farther East Than Thought.")

"With their small population groups, Neanderthals did not really have a great source population," Cleghorn said.

"They didn't really have the numbers and the density" to rebuild their populations after the eruptions.

"Not Convinced" by Volcanoes Theory

The researchers acknowledge that there are gaps in the volcanoes theory. For instance, the time line needs to be better defined—did the volcanic eruptions occur in a period of months, years, or decades?

"At this point, it's impossible to pin down a reliable date" for the eruptions, Cleghorn said. "We can't say, This eruption happened 50 years before the next eruption. We just don't have that kind of resolution."

It's also unknown exactly how long it took the Neanderthals to die out—or how long after the eruptions modern humans began settling Europe in force, she said.

Anthropologist John Hoffecker, though, suggests that modern humans had already begun crowding out Neanderthals in Europe long before the eruptions in question.

Judging from discoveries of modern-human artifacts in former Neanderthal strongholds, Hoffecker said, "Neanderthals were clearly in trouble well before 40,000 years ago, because modern humans were occupying certain places, such as Italy, where Neanderthals had been present. So something clearly had gone wrong there."

Perhaps, he added, the volcanic eruptions just dealt the final blow.

"I'm not entirely convinced that's the case either," said Hoffecker, of the University of Colorado. "But at least that's a plausible scenario that's consistent with the chronology."

Study co-author Cleghorn counters that the modern human populations living in Europe 40,000 years ago were small and isolated, and only after the Neanderthals were gone did Homo sapiens populations explode.

"If modern humans were making any forays into European Neanderthal territory prior to this, they were doing it only on the very margins," Cleghorn said.

"What was keeping them from moving very quickly into the heart of Europe? We think Neanderthals were still holding their own and might have held out for much longer, if it hadn't been for the devastating impact of these eruptions."
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References:

Than, Ker. 2010. "Volcanoes Killed Off Neanderthals, Study Suggests". National Geographic News. Posted: September 22, 2010. Available online: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/01/100922-volcanoes-eruptions-neanderthals-science-volcanic-humans/

Neanderthal's Cozy Bedroom Unearthed

Anthropologists have unearthed the remains of an apparent Neanderthal cave sleeping chamber, complete with a hearth and nearby grass beds that might have once been covered with animal fur.

Neanderthals inhabited the cozy Late Pleistocene room, located within Esquilleu Cave in Cantabria, Spain, anywhere between 53,000 to 39,000 years ago, according to a Journal of Archaeological Science paper concerning the discovery.

Living the ultimate clean and literally green lifestyle, the Neanderthals appear to have constructed new beds out of grass every so often, using the old bedding material to help fuel the hearth.

"It is possible that the Neanderthals renewed the bedding each time they visited the cave," lead author Dan Cabanes told Discovery News.

Cabanes, a researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science's Kimmel Center for Archaeological Research, added that these hearth-side beds also likely served as sitting areas during waking hours for the Neanderthals.

"In some way, they were used to make the area near the hearths more comfortable," he said, mentioning that artifacts collected from various other Neanderthal sites suggest the inhabitants prepared stone tools, cooked, ate and snoozed near warming fires.

For this study, Cabanes and his team collected sediment samples from the Spanish cave. Detailed analysis of the samples allowed the scientists to reconstruct what materials were once present in certain parts of the cave at particular times.

The bedding material was identified based on the presence and arrangement of multiple phytoliths from grasses near the hearth area. Phytoliths are tiny fossilized particles formed of mineral matter by a once-living plant.

There was no evidence of plants growing, soil developing or animal transport of phytoliths via dung, so the scientists believe the only plausible explanation is that Neanderthals gathered the grass and placed it in this room of the cave.

While the hearth contained some grass phytoliths, most belonged to wood and bark, "indicating that this material was the main type of fuel used," according to the researchers. Some animal bones were also tossed into the hearth, perhaps to dispose of them after dinner and/or for use as extra fire fuel.

Evidence is building that Neanderthals in other locations constructed such functional living spaces within caves and rock shelters.

Earlier this year, Josep Vallverdu of the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution and his team identified a "sleeping activity area" at Spain's Abric Romani rock shelter.

Similar to the Esquilleu Cave finds, Vallverdu and his colleagues discovered the remains of hearths spaced enough for seating and sleeping areas.

"This set of combustion activity areas suggests analogy with sleeping and resting activity areas of modern foragers," Vallverdu and his team wrote. They added that such information can allow anthropologists to estimate the size of Neanderthal populations, in addition to learning more about how they lived.

The big question, according to Cabanes, is how such a resourceful species went extinct.

"In my opinion, Neanderthal extinction may have been caused by several factors working at the same time," he said. "Environmental changes, a slightly different social organization, a different rate of reproduction, spread of diseases, direct competition for resources and many other factors may have played an important role in the fate of Neanderthals."

He and other researchers have also not ruled out that Neanderthals were simply absorbed into the modern human population.

Cabanes is hopeful that future analysis of phytoliths, as well as other less obvious clues that have often been overlooked by scientists in the past, may shed additional light on the still-mysterious Neanderthals.
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References:

Viegas, Jennifer. 2010. "Neanderthal's Cozy Bedroom Unearthed". Discovery News. Posted: August 6, 2010. Available online: http://news.discovery.com/archaeology/neanderthal-bedroom-house.html

Russians restore face to 30,000+ year-old Kostenki cave man

There are lots of interesting links embedded in this story. To follow them go to the original story.

According to a Jan. 1, 2010 BBC news article, by BBC News science reporter, Paul Rincon, "DNA analyzed from early European," scientists have studied and extracted DNA from the remains of a 30,000 year old European cave man who hunted wild mammoths in the region of Kostenki, Russia about five to ten thousand years before the last ice age began, at a time when Russia was warmer than it is today. Also, in another study, scientists found that about 4 percent (from 2% to 5%) of Europeans, East Asians, Papua-New Guineans, but not any Africans, have inherited Neanderthal genes, at least traces of them. The prehistoric man is known as the Markina Gora skeleton.

These genes may have been acquired thousands of years ago when bands of roaming Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens possibly mated in the Middle East/Levant or Central Asia area. Homo Sapiens mixed with a few Neanderthals then migrated throughout Asia all the way to China and Papua-New Guinea, then attached to mainland Asia, and then turned West and expanded from Central Asia and India into Europe, carrying traces of Neanderthal genes. At one time, about 60,000 years ago Neanderthals lived in the Levant/Middle East, with Neanderthals and humans eventually retreating back into Europe when the Levant opened up during a warmer interstatial period between two ice ages. By 50,000 years ago, both humans and Neaderthals lived in Europe, but their territories didn't overlap too much.

Neanderthals lived in Western Europe, and Homo Sapiens lived mainly in Eastern Europe, until another ice age forced Homo Sapiens further west into Europe, the Cro-Magnons, who settled in refuges during the ice age in Spain, France, Italy, and the Balkans, gradually overtaking the Neaderthal's territory. The last refuge of the Neanderthals was in Western Portugal and Spain. But for a time, Neanderthals and humans shared living spaces or territories in what today is Croatia and Romania.

After 50-000 to 45,000 years ago Homo Sapiens moved into Eastern Europe moving in a Northwestern direction from areas Southeast as the Neanderthals who had lived all over Europe for the past 200,000 years retreated back to their familiar Western European homeland. For those 200,000 years, Homo Sapiens lived in Eastern Africa, gradually moving east through Asia, and then turning west from Asia into Eastern Europe.

By 40,000 years ago, humans from Central Asia again met Neanderthals on their way to Eastern Europe as the both groups moved toward Western Europe. Since Neanderthals mated in small numbers with humans, they shouldn't be called a different species. Usually different species can't breed fertile offspring. But since 2% to 4% of Neanderthal genes are found in humans, just traces, but still it shows they did have offspring together on a small scale.

Neanderthals lived mostly in Western Europe and the Levant, whereas early Homo Sapiens before the last ice age lived in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, before later moving into Western Europe, where the Neanderthals retreated by 28,000 years ago to Western Portugal and Spain. Basically, in another study, scientists found there was mating between the two with children resulting in that 2% to 5% of the population of humans today, of traces of Neanderthal genes. For further information on how this study was done, check out the article, "Neanderthal Genes Found in Some Modern Humans." Also see, "Neanderthal Gene Found in Human DNA of People Living Out of Africa."

The facial restoration reported in the Jan. 1, 2010 BBC News article, DNA analyzed from early European, of the 30,000 year old man in Russia, depicts an ancient Homo Sapien man in Europe who perhaps still retains his undifferentiated features before the last ice age. After the latest ice age, the features on ancient skulls appear to change in Europe, possibly due to thousands of years of diminished sun light and extreme cold. In fact, all over the world, people were undifferentiated from their original African features from the time humans left Africa about 80,000 years ago to populate the world.

Features also began to change when humans migrated out of India to Central Asia, remaining there thousands of years, until they began to enter Eastern Europe from Central Asia and the steppes thousands of more years later, arriving in Russia, about 40,000 years ago for the Gravettian age. Before that time, people also entered Europe from the Levant, about 44,000 years ago, taking refuge in Spain and S. France. But again, scientists are still researching these theories.

Not only have the scientists extracted DNA to trace the origins and migrations of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which points to where his mother came from theoretically, artists also restored his face on the preserved skull to show what he looked like before Europeans began to change whatever facial features they had to look like most do today. Basically, he still retained his robust, but modern features.

He's a homo sapien whose so-called 'race' had not been yet changed by the cold of the last ice age climate that began in Europe about 20,000 to 25,000 years ago. At 30,000 to 32,000 years ago, his estimated age, cave paintings show rhinos in France, and lions as well as mammoths and other prehistoric animals throughout Europe.

Where'd he come from before reaching Russia? Probably, Central Asia, and before that? Possibly, NW India or where Pakistan is located today. After 13,000 years ago, you'd also find more diversity in the Kostenki, Russia region as people expanded from France and Spain into that area. But at 30,000 years ago, the Gravettian culture coming out of the steppes and Central Asia walked through Russia, living in caves and building houses outside of them with mammoth bones from the Ukraine to Siberia.

Studying the DNA of long-dead humans can open up a window into the evolution of our species (Homo sapiens). Scientists had to work with efficacy to distinguish between the ancient human DNA and modern contamination. In Current Biology journal, a German-Russian team details how it was possible to overcome this hurdle.

According to the BBC article, Svante Paabo, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues used the latest DNA sequencing techniques to study genetic information from human remains unearthed in 1954 at Kostenki, Russia.

Excavations at Kostenki, on the banks of the river Don in southern Russia, have yielded large concentrations of archaeological finds from the Palaeolithic (roughly 40,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago). Some of the finds date back as far as 45,000 years.

So who was the man? The tall, athletic 20-25 year old handsome 'hunk' (when his face was restored by sculptors) had been buried with meticulous attention to detail in an oval grave or pit. Obviously, he was well-liked by his companions or family. In comparison, you see Neanderthal womens' skeletons dumped on the garbage heaps, whereas the men were buried with flowers.

But various mainstream media as well as numerous science publications report that Homo sapien men, and homo sapien female skeletons also, were buried carefully with compassion and elaborate positions. Some nearby skeletons in Russia from the period 25,000 years ago and before, were buried with hundreds of ivory beads, fur hats, jewelry made from perforated fox teeth, and other signs of being buried with food, clothing, and possessions to take with them in the next world.

It's a sign of how the society values its moms when you find them tossed onto the garbage heap while the men are buried with their hunting tools, as the Neaderthals had done, at least in one finding, compared to the Homo sapiens that showed dignity and respect to all members of the family, at least in how they were buried and what tools and garments they took with them.

The 30,000 year old skeleton of Kostenki is known as the Markina Gora skeleton. Archaeologists found him lying in a crouched position with fists reaching upwards and a face orientated down towards the dirt. The bones were painted with a pigment called red ochre, thought to have been used in prehistoric funeral rites. Interestingly, red ochre resembles blood, which is way most babies look when they're first born.

The ochre seemed to symbolize preparing the body for a birth in reverse, a journey back to where he came from, Mother Earth, so to speak. Why else would he be painted in a red pigment as opposed to yellow ochre which was a common pigment also used then for skin decor?

The type of DNA extracted and analyzed is that stored in mitochondria - the "powerhouses" of cells. This mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed down from a mother to her offspring, providing a unique record of maternal inheritance. When archaeologists and other scientist test the 30,000 year old bones for DNA, they can separate Neanderthal mtDNA from Homo Sapien because there are at least 27 differences in the genes between Neanderthal and Homo Sapien DNA.

The new technology prevents looking at contamination from modern DNA and mistaking it for ancient types. That new technology has been pioneered in the study of DNA from Neanderthal bones. Actually there are three features that distinguish modern DNA from ancient DNA, which prevents contamination, using this new technology. For more information on it, check out the BBC article, DNA analyzed from early European.

One example would be that fragments of ancient DNA are often shorter than those from modern sources. You need the new technology because researchers found many fragments of ancient DNA were too small to be amplified by older method. Another example that's characteristic of ancient DNA is its tendency to show particular changes, or mutations, in the genetic sequence at the ends of DNA molecules.

And worse yet, the third feature was a characteristic breakage of molecules at particular positions in the DNA strand. That's why the new technique of analysis has been developed to distinguish between all three issues when looking at ancient DNA.

The biggest problem when looking at ancient bones is that modern DNA can infiltrate ancient remains. Scientists even find that ancient bones of animals are so contaminated by modern human DNA that researchers usually find modern human DNA on old animal bones that have been handled so much just digging them out.

Now, the new technique allowed researchers to sequence a full mtDNA genome--that is the full mitochondrial DNA that looks at what the ancient man inherited from his mother as far as mtDNA. He was found at the Markina Gorahave area in Kostenki, Russia, a home to many ancient cave people from before the last ice age. The question is why were relatively so many Europeans living in Russia 30,000 years ago?

Scientists have been trying to find out whether those people living in Europe 30,000 years ago are the direct ancestors of the modern populations living there today, or whether they were replaced by immigrants from elsewhere who arrived only a few thousand years ago from the Balkans and the Middle East to introduce farming to Europe.

That's what local and national media keeps reporting. But this is the first time that mainstream science news publications have published articles from more advanced technical research reporting that modern people do have some Neanderthal genes, but not Africans from Africa (not mixed with Europeans or East Asians). So how many Sacramentans are concerned that they have traces of Neanderthal genes? Not many. But what are they physical characteristics of Neanderthals compared to Homo Sapiens?

Neanderthals were more muscular with more body fat, a wide waist, and also had a wide rib cage, short limbs, stocky, short bodies, and didn't run very fast. The circular bones in their inner ears that helped to control gait, kept them from moving fast on foot. In contrast, homo sapiens had larger circular bones in their ears, allowing them to run fast. They were tall and thin.

Basically, homo sapiens were perfectly suited to African climate. Neanderthals were suited to very cold weather, for example, the climate in ice age Europe. Neanderthals had larger brains and heads, but were shorter in height and had short life spans. But both had similar hyoid bones, allowing for at least basic speech. Neanderthal women had larger pelvic inlet depths making childbirth easy, but the babies were larger. But the fact that they could inter-breed and produce fertile offspring might signal they were not different species.

The modern European gene pool contains a wide variety of mtDNA lineages that includes descendants of the Huns and other Central Asians, N. Europeans, S. Europeans, Middle Eastern peoples, and East Asians as well as any one else arriving in Europe in the last 5,000 to 10,000 years. What happened to those who arrived in Europe 30,000 to 50,000 years ago? And did they come from Central Asia, the Middle East, or anywhere else?

Studying these maternal lineages provides scientists with clues to the origins and histories of human populations. Scientists look for genetic signatures in order to classify an individual's mtDNA into different types, or "haplogroups". These haplogroups represent major branches on the family tree of Homo sapiens. The 30,000-year old Russian cave man had U2 mtDNA. And people in Europe today have U2 DNA as well as people living in India.

You have numerous people with U2e, the European version of U2 living in Europe, especially in Italy today, and Germany as well as other places in Europe. It's widely distributed throughout all of Europe in current times. And you have Indian-specific U2i mtDNA living primarily in India, especially N.W. India and Kashmir.

So was Europe populated by people from India, Kashmir, and Pakistan as well as the rest of Central Asia? Yes. And after that migration, around 40,000 years ago moving West into Russia and then into the rest of Europe came another migration from the Middle East, when climate allowed it to open up, around 45,000 years ago. A lot of those cave people were mammoth hunters or followed the animal herds before the last ice age began. But U2 in Europe is still pretty rare in modern populations, although it does exist.

According to the BBC news article, "U2 appears to be scattered at low frequencies in populations from South and Western Asia, Europe and North Africa."

Actually, you have U6 mtDNA living in North Africa today, U5 in Europe, U7 in the Middle East, U3 in Europe and the Middle East, U4 in the Caucasus, and U1 in Europe as well as K, which is a branch of U, throughout Europe and especially in the Alpine mountain areas, N. Italy, and Austria. But H is the most common mtDNA in Europe today.

Even though the cave man's U2 is a bit rare, it's still found in numerous Europeans today scattered in almost any country of Europe. That means the Paleolithic hunters had direct descendants alive today still living in Europe, including Russia, where they were found 30,000 years ago when tigers, lions, and rhinos roamed Europe before the last ice age.

You have to separate the ancient U2, from the more common U5 in Europe today, but realize, people with U2 are still in Europe and perhaps are the great grand children thousands of generations forward, of that cave man. So the ancient U2 probably arrived in Europe during Paleolithic times, 30,000 or 40,000 years ago, and has a link back in time with the U2 found in India. In fact the U branch of mtDNA is the oldest in Europe.

According to the BBC article, scientists found that there were a very high percentage of U types in the skeletal remains of ancient hunter-gatherers from Central Europe compared with later farming immigrants and modern people from the region. H mtDNA is the most common in Europe today also, especially in Western Europe. But H also lived 20,000 years ago in Spain and Southern France, using the Pyrenees as a refuge from the ice age. At that time, penguins roamed in the Mediterranean, and winters during the ice age were similar to modern winters in Alaska.

In 2009, an analysis of mtDNA from 28,000-year-old remains unearthed at Paglicci Cave in Italy showed this individual belonged to haplogroup "H" - the most common type found in modern Europeans. Basically scientists surmise that about 80 percent of Europeans are descended from these early hunters that entered Europe about 50,000 years ago from Central Asia, about 45,000 years ago from the Levant.

And about 20 percent of farmers entered Europe between 10,000 years ago and 3,000 years ago from the Middle East, Turkey (Anatolia), and the Balkans, with farming arriving about 7,000 years ago, more or less, depending upon how far north the ideas of farming traveled to the fishing villages to introduce cheese making and planting vegetables instead of picking wild berries and roots. For futher information see the BBC News article, DNA analyzed from early European. Or browse the paperback book, How to Interpret Family History and Ancestry DNA Test Results for Beginners - Google Books.

If you want to have your own DNA tested to see whether you're related to this ancient hunter-gatherer or any other type, Family Tree DNA tests DNA for ancestry, including deep ancestry. There's also the Family Finder Test to see what other people are related to you back about seven generations from anywhere in the world. That tests your autosomal DNA. Or you could test your Y chromosome for male ancestors or mtDNA to see where in time or possibly geography your mother's side might have come from. That's one way to cover your own culture from prehistory to present in the media or for your private viewing.

The UC Davis Anthropology Department is distinctive in its respect for multiple pathways through the discipline. The majors there specialize in Evolution or Socioculture. The major is organized into two Wings, a Sociocultural Wing including Linguistic Anthropology, and an Evolutionary Wing including Archaeology and Biological Anthropology.

So when news of genetic testing of Neanderthals from Europe, Croatia, for example and modern humans from around the world are compared, it's the scholarly magazines and news services from Europe rather than the local daily papers that made national news media with the announcement that about four percent, (ranging from two to five percent) of all modern humans not of African descent have Neanderthal genes left over from matings between the two peoples in prehistoric times.

The latest finding last month was not reported in the local media, but would have interested Sacramentans to find out that many of them have traces of Neanderthal genes from human-Neanderthal matings that happened more than 30,000 years ago. In fact, Sacramentans who are not of African descent, that means those with European, East Asian, and certain Pacific Islands ancestry (Papua-New Guinea) were surprised to find out from mass media science magazines and mainstream news publications that they carry an average of 4% (with a range of 2% to 4%) of Neanderthal genes, according to the latest genomic studies reported in the mass media, according to the May 7, 2010 article in Cosmos Magazine, "Neanderthal genes found in some modern humans."

Mainstream media in Sacramento doesn't report too often scientific breakthroughs unless they have to do with healthcare or recalled food rather than ancient history and genomics, except for the few articles coming out of UC Davis. British magazines report more archaeology findings than daily newspapers and magazines that focus on local news. But Sacramentans do have two universities locally both offering majors in special areas of anthropology and archaeology.
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References:

Hart, Anne. 2010. "Russians restore face to 30,000+ year-old Kostenki cave man". All Voices. Posted: June 19, 2010. Available online: http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/6113665-russians-restore-face-to-30000-yearold-kostenki-russia-cave-man