The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals?

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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu May 01, 2014 9:41 am

Neanderthals were not less intelligent than modern humans, scientists find
Researchers say there is no evidence that modern humans' cognitive superiority led to demise of Neanderthals

The Guardian, Wednesday 30 April 2014 17.00 EDT

Scientists have concluded that neanderthals were not the primitive dimwits they are commonly portrayed to have been.

The view of the Neanderthal man as a club-wielding brute is one of the most enduring stereotypes in science, but researchers who trawled the archaeological evidence say the image has no basis whatsoever.

They said scientists had fuelled the impression of Neanderthals being less than gifted in scores of theories that purport to explain why the Neanderthals died out while supposedly superior modern humans survived.

Wil Roebroeks at Leiden University in the Netherlands said: "The connotation is generally negative. For instance, after incidents with the Dutch Ajax football hooligans about a week ago, one Dutch newspaper piece pleaded to make football stadiums off-limits for such 'Neanderthals'."

The Neanderthals are believed to have emerged roughly between 350,000 and 400,000 years ago, their populations spreading from Portugal in the west to the Altai mountains in central Asia in the east. They vanished from the fossil record when modern humans arrived in Europe.

The reasons for the demise of the Neanderthals have long been debated in the scientific community, but many explanations assume that modern humans had a cognitive edge that manifested itself in more cooperative hunting, better weaponry and innovation, a broader diet, or other major advantages.

Roebroeks and his colleague, Dr Paola Villa at the University of Colorado Museum in Boulder, trawled through the archaeological records to look for evidence of modern human superiority that underpinned nearly a dozen theories about the Neanderthals' demise and found that none of them stood up.

"The explanations make good stories, but the only problem is that there is no archaeology to back them up," said Roebroeks.

Villa said part of the misunderstanding had arisen because researchers compared Neanderthals with their successors, the modern humans who lived in the upper paleolithic, rather than the humans who lived at the same time. That is like saying people in the 19th century were less intelligent than those in the 21st because they didn't have laptops and space travel.

"The evidence for cognitive inferiority is simply not there," said Villa. "What we are saying is that the conventional view of Neanderthals is not true." The study is published in the journal Plos One.

So what did kill off our equally intelligent extinct cousins? Roebroecks said that the reasons must have been complex, and that recent genetic studies that have decoded the Neanderthal genome might reveal some clues. Those studies show that Neanderthals lived in small, fragmented groups, and interbred to some extent with modern humans. Some of their inbred male offspring were infertile. The arrival of modern humans may simply have swamped and assimilated them.

"Stereotypes help people to order their world, but the stereotype of the primitive Neanderthal is now gradually eroding, at least in scientific circles," said Roebroecks.
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 15, 2014 10:42 am

Was Neanderthal shot by a time traveller?
MYSTERY ... did guns exist before we think?

Published on the
14 August
2014

ONE day in 1922, near Broken Hill, Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), a skull was found. When it came to the attention of the British Museum, the curators were pleased.

It was, in fact, a Neanderthal skull, and Neanderthal bones did not exactly come ten-a-penny.

But the Broken Hill skull was special for other reasons. On the left side of the cranium was a small, perfectly round hole. At first it was assumed that it had been made by a spear, or other sharp implement, but further investigation proved that this had not been the case.

When a skull is struck by a relatively low-velocity projectile – such as an arrow, or spear – it produces what are known as radial cracks or striations; that is, minute hairline fractures running away from the place of impact.

As there were no radial fractures on the Neanderthal skull, it was unanimously concluded that the projectile must have had a far, far greater velocity than an arrow or spear. But what?

Another mystery was that the right side of the cranium had, in the words of one anthropologist, “been blown away”. Further research also proved that that the right side of the cranium had been “blown away” from the inside out.

In short, whatever had hit the Broken Hill Neanderthal on the left side of his head had passed through it with such force that it had caused the right side to explode.

Researcher Rene Noorbergen, who investigated the mystery in his excellent book Secrets Of The Lost Races, commented: “This same feature is seen in modern victims of head wounds received from shots from a high-powered rifle.”

Noorbergen’s comments were more than appropriate, for forensic experts who have studied the skull in Berlin have since concluded that, “The cranial damage to Rhodesian Man’s skull could not have been caused by anything but a bullet”.

Compounding the mystery further is the fact that the skull of an ancient aurochs (an extinct type of bison) was found in Russia by the Lena River.

It, too, had been shot in the head, thousands of years previously, but had survived for some time, as the bullet hole had calcified.

This sensational discovery came to the attention of professor Constantin Flerov, curator of Moscow’s Palaeontological Museum of the USSR, who promptly put the skull on display.

Incredible though it sounds, we are faced with quite forceful evidence that, thousands of years ago, someone discharged a bullet into the skull of one of our anthropological cousins and also nearly killed a large mammal by the same method. But how could this be?

One obvious (but very radical) solution is to conclude that, contrary to what we have always understood, ancient man may have been technologically developed to a very high degree. Did a small but advanced civilisation develop the concept of ballistics long before the Chinese?

The problem with this idea is that it is too much of a coincidence. Could two separate societies, separated by thousands of years and a vast cultural gulf, have both invented weapons that just happened to fire small, cylindrical projectiles at high speed?

One colleague suggested to me that the only alternative is the possibility that someone from the future, carrying a firearm, travelled back into the past and engaged in some sort of trans-temporal hunting expedition.

This takes us perilously close to the realms of science fantasy, of course, but the fact is that the hole in the aurochs’ skull got there somehow.

Like it or not, the fact is that someone or something seemed to be using high-velocity bullets thousands of years ago. We don’t know who, we don’t know why and we don’t know how – but it happened.
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 22, 2014 4:49 pm

Scientists sequence genome of 45,000-year-old man
Date
October 23, 2014 - 4:00AM


Humans and Neanderthals interbred earlier
DNA extracted from a 45-000-year-old bone narrows the date when modern humans and Neanderthals first interbred.

He lived about 45,000 years ago and died on the banks of a river in Siberia and now scientists have decoded his DNA to narrow the time when humans and Neanderthals first got a little bit frisky.

The individual, named Ust'-Ishim man after the settlement close to his burial site, represents the earliest modern human outside Africa to have their genome sequenced.

An international team of geneticists, led by ancient DNA specialist Svante Paabo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, extracted DNA from the man's thigh bone.

Neanderthals and modern humans likely interbred between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago.

The team used radio carbon dating to established the bone was about 45,000 years old.

The man's genetic blueprint suggests he came from a population of ancient humans that lived before, or with, the population of Eurasians that separated into western and eastern groups.

The man's genes also narrow the date when modern humans and Neanderthals interbred to between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago.

Geneticists extracted DNA from the thigh bone of Ust'-Ishim man, who lived 45,000 years ago.

Based on the genomes of living people, researchers have previously estimated modern humans and Neanderthals interbred between 36,000 and 80,000 years ago.

"This new sequence proves it was at least 6000 years prior to that," said Jeremy Austin, an ancient DNA researcher from the University of Adelaide, who was not involved with the research.

He said sequencing ancient DNA allowed scientists to peer back in time and observe breeding events as they happened, rather than infer what may have happened based on the genomes of contemporary humans.

While the Ust'-Ishim man carried a similar amount of Neanderthal DNA as contemporary Eurasians, his were packaged in longer segments.

As genetic information is passed from one generation to another segments of DNA break up and recombine, which meant younger Eurasians would have shorter sections of Neanderthal DNA.

"The closer you get to that interbreeding time period the longer the Neanderthal pieces of chromosomes become," said Dr Austin, the deputy director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, at the University of Adelaide.

The results also provide insights into migration patterns as early humans moved out of Africa and across central Asia.

Dr Austin said one theory suggested that an early coastal migration from African gave rise to people now living in Oceania. And a later second wave of people from Africa gave rise to Europeans and mainland Asians.

But the existence of a 45,000-year-old man from Siberia, who is not more closely related to the descendants of either group, suggests there may have been another group that migrated through central and east Asia, said the research team.

Their findings have been published in the journal Nature.
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby Lord Balto » Wed Oct 22, 2014 5:34 pm

Genetic analysis of these extinct lineages’ fossils has revealed they once interbred with our ancestors, with recent estimates suggesting that Neanderthal DNA made up 1 percent to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes.


I am always suspicious of statistics like this, as 96-98% of human DNA is identical to chimpanzee DNA. So, 1%-4% of what exactly?
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 22, 2014 5:45 pm

if I had a subscription to Nature maybe I could answer that question

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v5 ... 13810.html
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 23, 2014 12:33 pm

Thoroughly modern humans interbred with Neanderthals

18:00 22 October 2014 by Michael Slezak
For similar stories, visit the Evolution , Love and Sex and Human Evolution Topic Guides
Read full articleContinue reading page |1|2
When humans hooked up with Neanderthals, we could have wooed them with music and fancy jewellery.

The oldest DNA of a modern human ever to be sequenced shows that the Homo sapiens who interbred with the Neanderthals were very modern – not just anatomically but with modern behaviour including painting, modern tools, music and jewellery.

Some previous estimates had placed the first interspecies liaison much earlier, before the emergence of these features. The new DNA sequence shows it actually happened in the middle of an age called the Initial Upper Palaeolithic, when there was an explosion of modern human culture.

About 2 per cent of many people's genomes today is made up of Neanderthal DNA, a result of interbreeding between the two species that can be seen in everyone except people from sub-Saharan Africa. The so-called Ust'-Ishim man, named after the town in western Siberia where he was found, carries a similar proportion of Neanderthal DNA in his genome as present-day Eurasians, and a combination of radiocarbon and genetic dating shows he died only about 45,000 years ago.

Before now we couldn't rule out that our fraction of Neanderthal ancestry was the result of interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans who were in the near east before Neanderthals got there, says David Reich from Harvard University, a co-author on the paper. While these near-eastern humans were anatomically modern, they did not show modern behaviour, he says.

The researchers could work out when Neanderthals first became part of the man's ancestry by analysing the lengths of the Neanderthal regions of DNA in his genome. DNA gets chopped up and scrambled over successive generations, and the lengths in his genome showed that he was descended a mere 230 to 400 generations from human-Neanderthal interbreeding between 7000 and 13,000 years before. This pinpoints the date of our interbreeding with Neanderthals to 50,000 to 60,000 thousand years ago, ruling out almost 50,000 years of previously possible dates.

"This new paper definitively says it was modern humans with modern human behaviour that interbred with Neanderthals," Reich says.

"The new timing rules out earlier modern humans in the Middle East [from participating] in the admixture," says Janet Kelso from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, one of the lead researchers on the project.

The Initial Upper Palaeolithic was a period around 50,000 years ago when complex stone and bone tools appeared across Eurasia, along with body ornamentation like pierced shells and animal teeth, pigments and even musical instruments, says team member Tom Higham of the University of Oxford. It is unknown which human-like species made these sophisticated artefacts, but the finding that Ust'-Ishim man was in Siberia at this time means that it could have been modern humans, he says.

Plotting the family tree




At around 45,000 years old, Ust'-Ishim man is the oldest modern human ever to have been sequenced. This title was previously held by a a 24,000 year old boy, also from Siberia, whose DNA was sequenced last year.

"This is very exciting research that shows again the remarkable power of ancient DNA analysis to help solve seemingly intractable questions in human evolution science," says Darren Curnoe from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

By comparing Ust'-Ishim's genome to various groups of modern and ancient humans, the researchers are filling in gaps in the map of initial human migrations around the globe. They found that he is as genetically similar to present-day East Asians as to ancient genomes found in Western Europe and Siberia, suggesting that the population he was part of split from the ancestors of both Europeans and East Asians, prior to their divergence from each other.

"He represents a group that settled Siberia and then disappeared without leaving descendants," says Curnoe. "This tells us that as early humans left Africa and settled Eurasia they weren't all successful. There were more populations than we thought, some making no contribution to living people at all." He notes this could make it difficult to interpret human fossils found in Eurasia, since we cannot assume that they are our ancestors.

But while Ust'-Ishim man does not appear to have any modern-day direct descendants living today, he is more genetically similar to present-day East Asians than to present-day Europeans. This finding is consistent with a recently proposed theory that present-day Europeans may have got some of their ancestry from later groups that weren't part of the initial migration into the area. "It supports that very strongly," says Reich, one of the researchers who developed the idea.

Irresistible Neanderthals

Homo sapiens is believed to have taken on Neanderthal DNA from at least two bouts of interbreeding. While sub-Saharan Africans have no Neanderthal DNA, Asian populations have more than Europeans.

"We know that there are likely to have been at least two admixture events into the ancestors of present-day people – the shared event early during modern human migration out of Africa, and a second event into the ancestors of present-day Asians," says Kelso.

Analysing the lengths of Ust'-Ishim's Neanderthal DNA has pinpointed the early shared interbreeding event to around 230 to 400 generations before him, but some longer stretches of DNA indicate that his ancestors had also interbred with Neanderthals even more recently. "There may have been a later admixture event into the ancestors of this individual," says Kelso.

Because there are only a few of these longer stretches, they were unable to precisely date when this later interbreeding may have happened. But whatever the date, it seems humans and Neanderthals found each other irresistible, or at least mated with each other fairly commonly, whenever we inhabited the same areas. "The timing is most likely simply a result of the fact that this is where the two groups overlapped geographically and temporally," says Kelso.
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby Twyla LaSarc » Fri Oct 24, 2014 6:01 pm

"This new paper definitively says it was modern humans with modern human behaviour that interbred with Neanderthals," Reich says.

Music and jewelery sounds postively romantic. If modern human behavior is involved, I cannot help but envision more likely scenarios. :hrumph
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 27, 2014 9:30 am

Supervolcano Cleared in Neanderthals' Demise
by Becky Oskin, Senior Writer | October 24, 2014 07:44am ET


The legendary home of Vesuvius, Campi Flegrei volcano is a cluster of more than 20 calderas, volcanic cones and hydrothermal vents.
Pin It The legendary home of Vesuvius, Campi Flegrei volcano is a cluster of more than 20 calderas, volcanic cones and hydrothermal vents.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Neanderthals disappeared from Europe 40,000 years ago, about the same time as the region's biggest volcanic blast in the last 200,000 years. But don't blame the volcano, a new studysuggests.

Most of the eruption's climate-cooling pollution spread east, away from Neanderthal territory, according to research presented Monday (Oct. 20) here at the Geological Society of America's annual meeting.

"The pattern where the cooling was most intense doesn't overlap with where most of the Neanderthal sites are located," said study author Benjamin Black, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.


The Neanderthals' demise is an ongoing mystery. Their steep population decline followed the arrival of modern humans in Europe, studies show. Did our ancestors play a role in the Neanderthal extinction? Was it the onset of a cold, dry climate? Or did Italy's Campi Flegrei volcano deliver the final blow?

Campi Flegrei is an active volcano west of Naples that erupted in a tremendous explosion between 39,000 and 40,000 years ago. Superheated pyroclastic flows of volcanic gas and ash raced up nearby ridges more than 3,200 feet (1,000 meters) high and crossed miles of open water in the Bay of Naples, scorching the Sorrento Peninsula. The ash layers left behind are known as the Campanian Ignimbrite. The volcano also shot sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere above the one we live and breathe in. In the stratosphere, sulfur dioxide is transformed into particles that reflect sunlight and cool the planet. [The 10 Biggest Volcanic Eruptions in History]

Black created a computer model of Campi Flegrei's globalenvironmental effects, and then compared the extent of cooling and acid rain with locations of known Neanderthal and human archaeological sites of the same age. (Sulfur dioxide gas can also lead to acid rain.) The results suggest the volcano's fallout was brief and limited in Western Europe, where most Neanderthals met their end by 40,000 years ago, according to the latest studies. "The unusual climatic conditions may have impacted daily life, but the effects did not last long enough to trigger a catastrophic collapse of the Neanderthal population," Black told Live Science.

In Eastern Europe, temperatures fell by about 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius). This amount of cooling is similar to Europe's so-called "year without a summer" in 1816, which followed Mount Tambora's 1815 eruption. On the Volcano Explosivity Index, a scale that ranks eruptions, both Campi Flegrei and Mount Tambora rank a 7 out of 8.

The most intense cooling, of up to 11 degrees F (6 degrees C), was centered over Asia and North America rather than Europe, according to Black's model. And even then, the worst of the chill lasted about a year. Within five years, sulfur levels and temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were nearly back to normal.

Scientists aren't sure how much ash and volcanic gas spewed from Campi Flegrei, so Black modeled both high- and low-emission scenarios and checked the results against 40,000-year-old sulfate levels preserved in the Greenland Ice Sheet. The best match comes from the low-emission scenario, with an estimated 55.1 million tons (50 teragrams) of volcanic sulfur dioxide used in the model.

Some researchers have connected other bottlenecks in human evolution to powerful volcanic outbursts, such as the Toba supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago. Yet recently, a separate study also found little evidence to support the link between Toba and a supposed die-off of humanity's African ancestors.

"Volcanoes can really impact climate in significant ways following an eruption, but it's challenging to attribute lingering effects to large, explosive, caldera-forming eruptions, even if they're really big," Black said.
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby Lord Balto » Mon Oct 27, 2014 10:35 am

seemslikeadream » Thu Oct 23, 2014 12:33 pm wrote:
Thoroughly modern humans interbred with Neanderthals

18:00 22 October 2014 by Michael Slezak
When humans hooked up with Neanderthals, we could have wooed them with music and fancy jewellery.

[...]

The oldest DNA of a modern human ever to be sequenced shows that the Homo sapiens who interbred with the Neanderthals were very modern – not just anatomically but with modern behaviour including painting, modern tools, music and jewellery.

"This new paper definitively says it was modern humans with modern human behaviour that interbred with Neanderthals," Reich says.

[...]



The subtext of this story is that Neanderthals were rather dumb and uncultured brutes, a meme that has existed since they were discovered and has only begun to unravel recently. With the discovery of early stone tools on Crete and Cyprus, it is becoming more and more likely that Neanderthals or even Homo erectus made it to these islands. And unless one wishes to postulate that they were long distance swimmers or invented the hot air balloon, the obvious conclusion is that they knew how to build and sail boats. It is even possible that it was the Neanderthals who interbred with so-called modern humans and raised their cultural level thereby.

And again, I must point out that modern humans are 96-98 chimpanzee by DNA. So a 2% Neanderthal would be as much as 100% Neanderthal by percentage of total DNA. There is clearly some misunderstanding in the reporting of the article, if not in the original article, of the proper use of percentages. It is much more likely that the 2% Nanderthal DNA is a percentage of the 2-4% non-chimp DNA found in modern humans, making the Neanderthal DNA 0.04-0.08% of the human genome.
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 27, 2014 11:14 am

but the real question is...... Were Neanderthals fascists?

Finding our Inner Neanderthal: Evolutionary Geneticist Svante Pääbo's DNA Quest

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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Nov 09, 2014 2:52 pm

DNA from 36,000-year-old skeleton sheds light on interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals
Date
November 7, 2014

A genome taken from a 36,000-year-old skeleton has helped scientists shed new light on interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals.

The ground-breaking study of DNA recovered from a fossil of one of the earliest known Europeans - a man who lived in western Russia - shows that the genetics of the earliest inhabitants of the continent survived the last ice age, helping form the basis of the modern-day population.

Known as the Kostenki genome, the DNA also contained evidence the man shared, as with all people of Eurasia today, a small percentage of Neanderthal genes, confirming previous findings which show a period when Neanderthals and the first humans to leave Africa for Europe briefly interbred.

This means that, even today, anyone with a Eurasian ancestry - from Chinese to Scandinavian and North American - has a small element of Neanderthal DNA.

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But despite Western Eurasians going on to share the European landmass with Neanderthals for another 10,000 years, no further periods of interbreeding occurred, the study said.

Robert Foley, a University of Cambridge professor, questioned whether Neanderthal populations were quickly dwindling and whether modern humans still encountered them.

"We were originally surprised to discover there had been interbreeding," Foley said.

"Now the question is, why so little?

"It's an extraordinary finding that we don't understand yet."

Lead author Eske Willerslev said the work revealed the complex web of population relationships in the past, generating for the first time a firm framework with which to explore how humans responded to climate change, encounters with other populations, and the dynamic landscapes of the ice age.

Led by the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, the study was conducted by an international team of researchers from institutions including the University of Cambridge's departments of archaeology and anthropology, and zoology.

Professor David Lambert and Dr Michael Westaway, from Griffith University in Queensland, were also part of an international team.

"The sequencing of the genome of Kostenki 14 is a major technical and scientific achievement and illustrates the importance of recovering genomes from ancient remains," Professor Lambert said.

"Only when we have entire genomes captured from back in time, as was possible with Kostenki 14, can we better detect and measure important events in the past history of species such as our own."

Scientists now believe Eurasians separated into at least three populations earlier than 36,000 years ago.

Western Eurasians, East Asians and a mystery third lineage, all of whose descendants would develop the unique features of most non-African peoples - but not before some interbreeding with Neanderthals took place.

The new study allows scientists to closer estimate this as occurring around 54,000 years ago, before the Eurasian population began to separate.

By cross-referencing the ancient man's complete genome - the second oldest modern human genome ever sequenced - with previous research, the team discovered a surprising unity running from the first modern humans in Europe, suggesting that a "meta-population" of hunter-gatherers with deep shared ancestry managed to survive through the last ice age and colonise the landmass of Europe for more than 30,000 years.
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Mar 03, 2015 8:51 am

21 FEBRUARY, 2015 - 00:35 MARK MILLER
Did light-skinned, redheaded Neanderthal women hunt with the men?
A team of Spanish researchers theorizes, based on grooves and nicks on the teeth of Neanderthals, that gender roles among that species were similar to gender roles of modern Homo Sapiens. Neanderthal men prepared the cutting tools and weapons, while women saw to the leather garments and clothing.
But there was at least one duty that men and women may have shared: Neanderthal women, these researchers think, hunted big game with the men.
Almudena Estalrrich, a researcher at the Spanish National Museum of Natural Sciences, said: “… We believe that the specialization of labor by sex of the individuals was probably limited to a few tasks, as it is possible that both men and women participated equally in the hunting of big animals.”
Another researcher on the project, Antonio Rosas, also with the museum, told Phys.org: “The study of Neanderthals has provided numerous discoveries in recent years. We have moved from thinking of them as little evolved beings, to know that they took care of the sick persons, buried their deceased, ate seafood, and even had different physical features than expected: there were redhead individuals, and with light skin and eyes. So far, we thought that the sexual division of labor was typical of sapiens societies, but apparently that's not true.”

Restoration of a Neanderthal woman cleaning a reindeer skin. (Wikimedia Commons)
A study of ancient DNA by other researchers showed a mutation that may have resulted in red hair and light skin among Neanderthals, according to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. An article on the Smithsonian’s website says two Neanderthals, one from Spain and one from Italty, had a mutation in a gene controlling skin and hair color. “The mutation changes an amino acid, making the resulting protein less efficient. Modern humans have other MCR1 variants that are also less active, resulting in red hair and pale skin. The less active Neanderthal mutation probably also resulted in red hair and pale skin, as in modern humans.”
For much of history, men in most societies were the hunters. An exception was Artemis, the Greek Goddess of the Hunt, seen above in a calyx with bow in hand.
For much of history, men in most societies were the hunters. An exception was Artemis, the Greek Goddess of the Hunt, seen above in a calyx with bow in hand. (Marcus Cyron photo/Wikimedia Commons)
Phys.org says one of the main conclusions of a study of 99 incisors and canines of 19 Neanderthal people showed that their communities divided work according to sex. The study by the Spanish National Research Council was published in the Journal of Human Evolution.
The Neanderthals’ teeth came from sites in El Sidron, Asturias, Spain; Spy, Belgium; and L’Hortus, France. The study said grooves in the teeth of women appeared to follow the same pattern. The pattern of the grooves in women’s teeth differed from that in men’s.
Analyses show that all Neanderthals, regardless of age, had grooves in their teeth. "This is due to the custom of these societies to use the mouth as a third hand, as in some current populations, for tasks such as preparing the furs or chopping meat, for instance,” Rosas told Phys.org.
A comparison of Homo Sapiens, left, and Sapiens Neanderthal skulls from Cleveland Museum
A comparison of Homo Sapiens, left, and Sapiens Neanderthal skulls from Cleveland Museum (KaterBegemot photo/Wikimedia Commons)
The researchers found that the grooves in men’s teeth were longer than women’s and made the assumption from this that the tasks the two sexes performed differed. Also, they found tiny nicks in the enamel and dentin of the upper teeth of men and in the lower teeth of women.
Researchers are unable to make rock-solid conclusions about which tasks men performed and which tasks women performed. But they said in modern hunter-gatherer society women typically prepare furs and other garments and men retouch the edges of stone tools. They say this may have been how it was among the Neanderthals they studied.



How hunting with wolves helped humans outsmart the Neanderthals
Forty thousand years ago in Europe our ancestors formed a crucial and lasting alliance that enabled us to finish off our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals
wolves and mamoths
A pack of dire wolves crosses paths with two mammoths during the Upper Pleistocene Epoch. Photograph: Alamy
Robin McKie
Saturday 28 February 2015 19.05 EST Last modified on Saturday 28 February 2015 19.08 EST

Dogs are humanity’s oldest friends, renowned for their loyalty and abilities to guard, hunt and chase. But modern humans may owe even more to them than we previously realised. We may have to thank them for helping us eradicate our caveman rivals, the Neanderthals.

According to a leading US anthropologist, early dogs, bred from wolves, played a critical role in the modern human’s takeover of Europe 40,000 years ago when we vanquished the Neanderthal locals.

“At that time, modern humans, Neanderthals and wolves were all top predators and competed to kill mammoths and other huge herbivores,” says Professor Pat Shipman, of Pennsylvania State University. “But then we formed an alliance with the wolf and that would have been the end for the Neanderthal.”

If Shipman is right, she will have solved one of evolution’s most intriguing mysteries. Modern humans are known to have evolved in Africa. They began to emigrate around 70,000 years ago, reaching Europe 25,000 years later. The continent was then dominated by our evolutionary cousins, the Neanderthals, who had lived there for more than 200,000 years. However, within a few thousand years of our arrival, they disappeared.

The question is: what finished them off? Some scientists blame climate change. Most argue that modern humans – armed with superior skills and weapons – were responsible. Shipman agrees with the latter scenario, but adds a twist. We had an accomplice: the wolf.

Modern humans formed an alliance with wolves soon after we entered Europe, argues Shipman. We tamed some and the dogs we bred from them were then used to chase prey and to drive off rival carnivores, including lions and leopards, that tried to steal the meat.

“Early wolf-dogs would have tracked and harassed animals like elk and bison and would have hounded them until they tired,” said Shipman. “Then humans would have killed them with spears or bows and arrows.

“This meant the dogs did not need to approach these large cornered animals to finish them off – often the most dangerous part of a hunt – while humans didn’t have to expend energy in tracking and wearing down prey. Dogs would have done that. Then we shared the meat. It was a win-win situation.”

At that time, the European landscape was dominated by mammoths, rhinos, bison and several other large herbivores. Both Neanderthals and modern humans hunted them with spears and possibly bows and arrows. It would have been a tricky business made worse by competition from lions, leopards, hyenas, and other carnivores, including wolves.

“Even if you brought down a bison, within minutes other carnivores would have been lining up to attack you and steal your prey,” said Shipman. The answer, she argues, was the creation of the human-wolf alliance. Previously they separately hunted the same creatures, with mixed results. Once they joined forces, they dominated the food chain in prehistoric Europe – though this success came at a price for other species. First Neanderthals disappeared to be followed by lions, mammoths, hyenas and bison over the succeeding millennia. Humans and hunting dogs were, and still are, a deadly combination, says Shipman.

The idea is controversial, however, because it pushes back the origins of dog domestication so deeply into our past. Most scientists had previously argued the domestication of dogs, from tamed wolves, began with the rise of agriculture, 10,000 years ago, though other research has suggested it began earlier, around 15,000 years ago.

But Shipman places it before the last Ice Age, pointing to recent discoveries of 33,000-year-old fossil remains of dogs in Siberia and Belgium. Although they look quite like wolves, the fossils also show clear signs of domestication: snouts that are shorter, jaws that are wider and teeth that are more crowded than those of a wild wolf.

Thus we began to change the wolf’s appearance and over the millennia turned them into all the breeds of dog we have today, from corgis to great Danes. Intriguingly, they may have changed our appearances as well, says Shipman, whose book, The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction, will be published this month. Consider the whites of our eyes, she states. The wolf possesses white sclera as does Homo sapiens though, crucially, it is the only primate that has them.

“The main advantage of having white sclera is that it is very easy to work out what another person is gazing at,” added Shipman. “It provides a very useful form of non-verbal communication and would have been of immense help to early hunters. They would been able to communicate silently but very effectively.”

Thus the mutation conferring white sclera could have become increasingly common among modern humans 40,000 years ago and would have conferred an advantage on those who were hunting with dogs.

By contrast, there is no evidence of any kind that Neanderthals had any relationship with dogs and instead they appear to have continued to hunt mammoths and elks on their own, a punishing method for acquiring food. Already stressed by the arrival of modern humans in Europe, our alliance with wolves would have been the final straw for Neanderthals.

Nor does the story stop in Europe, added Shipman. “I would see this as the beginning of the humans’ long invasion of the world. We took dogs with us wherever we went after our alliance formed in the palaeolithic. We took them to America and to the Pacific Islands. They made hunting easy and helped guard our food. It has been a very powerful alliance.”
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby Searcher08 » Tue Mar 03, 2015 11:04 am

Intuition:
I wonder about this, as the Neanderthals would have been extremely attuned to their environment and making connections / long term alliances with animals is surely something that a deeply nature-connected set of people would do naturally better than perhaps a more 'intellectually advanced' but less nature-connected set of people?
I wonder if there were diseases that were accidentally introduced, something similar to the epidemics that decimated Aztec culture?
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Apr 13, 2015 10:14 am

Oldest Neanderthal DNA Found in Italian Skeleton
by Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor | April 10, 2015 05:24pm ET


The remains of the so-called Altamura Man, now considered a Neanderthal, encrusted with calcite formations in Altamura, Italy.
Pin It The remains of the so-called Altamura Man, now considered a Neanderthal, encrusted with calcite formations in Altamura, Italy.
Credit: Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities, Superintendent of the Archeology of Puglia.
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The calcite-encrusted skeleton of an ancient human, still embedded in rock deep inside a cave in Italy, has yielded the oldest Neanderthal DNA ever found.

These molecules, which could be up to 170,000 years old, could one day help yield the most complete picture yet of Neanderthal life, researchers say.

Although modern humans are the only remaining human lineage, many others once lived on Earth. The closest extinct relatives of modern humans were the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and Asia until they went extinct about 40,000 years ago. Recent findings revealed that Neanderthals interbred with ancestors of today's Europeans when modern humans began spreading out of Africa — 1.5 to 2.1 percent of the DNA of anyone living outside Africa today is Neanderthal in origin. [Image Gallery: Our Closest Human Ancestor]


In 1993, scientists found an extraordinarily intact skeleton of an ancient human amidst the stalactites and stalagmites of the limestone cave of Lamalunga, near Altamura in southern Italy — a discovery they said had the potential to reveal new clues about Neanderthals.

"The Altamura man represents the most complete skeleton of a single nonmodern human ever found," study co-author Fabio Di Vincenzo, a paleoanthropologist at Sapienza University of Rome, told Live Science. "Almost all the bony elements are preserved and undamaged."

The Altamura skeleton bears a number of Neanderthal traits, particularly in the face and the back of the skull. However, it also possesses features that usually aren't seen in Neanderthals — for instance, its brow ridges were even more massive than those of Neanderthals.These differences made it difficult to tell which human lineage the Altamura man might have belonged to. Moreover, the Altamura skeleton remains partially embedded in rock, making it difficult to analyze.

Now, new research shows that DNA from a piece of the skeleton's right shoulder blade suggests the Altamura fossil was a Neanderthal. The shape of this piece of bone also looks Neanderthal, the researchers said.

In addition, the scientists dated the skeleton to about 130,000 to 170,000 years old. This makes it the oldest Neanderthal from which DNA has ever been extracted. (These bones are not the oldest known Neanderthal fossils — the oldest ones ever found are about 200,000 years old. This isn't the oldest DNA ever extracted from a human, either; that accolade goes to 400,000-year-old DNA collected from relatives of Neanderthals.)

The bone is so old that its DNA is too degraded for the researchers to sequence the fossil's genome — at least with current technology. However, they noted that next-generation DNA-sequencing technologies might be capable of such a task, which "could provide important results on the Neanderthal genome," study co-author David Caramelli, a molecular anthropologist at the University of Florence in Italy, told Live Science.

Whereas previous fragmentary fossils of different Neanderthals provided a partial picture of what life was like for Neanderthals, the Altamura skeleton could help paint a more complete portrait of a Neanderthal — for instance, it could reveal more details about Neanderthals' genetics, anatomy, ecology and lifestyle, the researchers said.

"We have a nearly complete human fossil skeleton to describe and study in detail. It is a dream," Di Vincenzo said. "His morphology offers a rare glimpse on the earliest phase of the evolutionary history of Neanderthals and on one of the most crucial events in human evolution. He can help us better understand when — and, in particular, how — Neanderthals evolved."

The scientists detailed their findings online March 21 in the Journal of Human Evolution.
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jun 22, 2015 8:05 pm

Ancient Man Had Neanderthal Great-Great Grandfather
Analysis of the jawbone of a man who lived about 40,000 years ago reveals the closest direct descendant of a Neanderthal who mated with a modern human.

By Michael D. Lemonick, for National Geographic
PUBLISHED JUNE 22, 2015

A modern human who lived in what is now Romania between 37,000 and 42,000 years ago had at least one Neanderthal ancestor as little as four generations back—which is to say, a great-great-grandparent.

Scientists have known for at least half a decade that living humans bear traces of Neanderthal blood—or more specifically, Neanderthal DNA. Just when and where our ancestors bred with their now-extinct cousins, however, has been tricky to pin down until now. A new study published Monday in the journal Nature has the highest percentage of Neanderthal DNA of any modern human ever studied.

“I could hardly believe that we were lucky enough to hit upon an individual like this,” says study co-author Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

The specimen, known as Oase 1, consists only of a male jawbone, and from the moment it was discovered in 2002 its shape suggested that it might belong to a hybrid between Homo sapiens and Neanderthal. Those claims have remained controversial, but the new analysis lays the controversy to rest. “It’s really stunning,” says Oxford’s Tom Higham, an expert on the Neanderthal-human transition who was not involved in this research.

Part of what stuns Higham is the genomic artistry it took to tease useful genetic information out of the tiny DNA samples lead author Qiaomei Fu of Harvard Medical School and her team were able to extract from the jawbone. “We tried to do this in 2009 and failed,” says Pääbo. His lab has been working since then to improve their techniques, with resounding success.

The genome they sequenced from the samples was incomplete, but it was enough for the scientists to conclude that between 6% and 9% of Oase 1’s genome is Neanderthal in origin. People living today have 4% at most.

That difference is more significant than it might seem. “We found seven huge pieces of chromosomes that seemed to be purely of Neanderthal origin,” says Pääbo. That means pieces had to come from a relatively recent ancestor, since they hadn’t yet been broken up by the reshuffling that happens in each generation as parents' chromosomes combine, he explains.

Picture of a Neanderthal jaw bone
This jawbone from a 40,000-year-old modern human shows some Neanderthal features—and DNA now confirms he had a Neanderthal ancestor as few as four generations back.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SVANTE PÄÄBO, MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY

The non-Neanderthal genome sequences, meanwhile, show that Oase 1 isn’t related to humans living today. His genealogical line died out at some point.

This analysis represents a biotechnological tour de force, but it also puts paleoanthropologists a step closer to fully answering to what Higham calls the $64,000 question: What happened to wipe out the Neanderthals, and when? Genomic analysis of a 45,000-year-old human thighbone last year suggested that humans and Neanderthals interbred in what is now Siberia sometime between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago—an extremely imprecise number, and a very broad conclusion.

“The great breakthrough here,” Higham says, “is the ability to say ‘this specific person had a Neanderthal great-great-grandfather.’ That puts a human timescale on it.” If scientists can figure out when interbreeding took place in different parts of Europe and the Middle East, they’ll be able to say in detail just how rapidly humans spread across these regions, how long they were in contact with Neanderthals—and maybe tell us at last why our nearest relatives vanished.
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