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 » Wed Aug 17, 2016 6:10 pm

Schizophrenia Emerged After Humans Diverged From Neanderthals
Schizophrenia poses an evolutionary enigma. The disorder has existed throughout recorded human history and persists despite its severe effects on thought and behavior, and its reduced rates of producing offspring.

SCHIZOPHRENIA POSES AN EVOLUTIONARY ENIGMA. THE DISORDER HAS EXISTED THROUGHOUT RECORDED HUMAN HISTORY AND PERSISTS DESPITE ITS SEVERE EFFECTS ON THOUGHT AND BEHAVIOR, AND ITS REDUCED RATES OF PRODUCING OFFSPRING.

A new study in Biological Psychiatry may help explain why-comparing genetic information of Neanderthals to modern humans, the researchers found evidence for an association between genetic risk for schizophrenia and markers of human evolution.

“This study suggests that schizophrenia is a modern development, one that emerged after humans diverged from Neanderthals,” said John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. “It suggests that early hominids did not have this disorder.”

The cause of schizophrenia remains unknown, but researchers know that genetics play a significant role in the development. According to senior author Ole Andreassen from the University of Oslo in Norway and University of California, San Diego, some think that schizophrenia could be a “side effect” of advantageous gene variants related to the acquisition of human traits, like language and complex cognitive skills, that might have increased our propensity to developing psychoses.

Along with Andreassen, first authors Saurabh Srinivasan and Francesco Bettella, both from the University of Oslo, and colleagues looked to the genome of Neanderthals, the closest relative of early humans, to pinpoint specific regions of the genome that could provide insight on the origin of schizophrenia in evolutionary history.

They analyzed genetic data from recent genome-wide association studies of people with schizophrenia for overlap with Neanderthal genomic information. The analysis tells researchers the likelihood that specific regions of the genome underwent positive selection sometime after the divergence of humans and Neanderthals.

Regions of the human genome associated with schizophrenia, known as risk loci, were more likely to be found in regions that diverge from the Neanderthal genome. An additional analysis to pinpoint loci associated with evolutionary markers suggests that several gene variants that have undergone positive selection are related to cognitive processes. Other such gene loci are known to be associated with schizophrenia and have previously been considered for a causal role in the disorder.

“Our findings suggest that schizophrenia vulnerability rose after the divergence of modern humans from Neanderthals,” said Andreassen, “and thus support the hypothesis that schizophrenia is a by-product of the complex evolution of the human brain.”


Zenkerella insignis, a mysterious rodent from central Africa, is among the least studied of all living mammals, said Erik Seiffert, study senior author and a professor of cell and neurobiology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. The last time scientists heard aboutZenkerella in the wild was two decades ago. Notably, only 11 Zenkerella specimens are curated in museums around the world. The three new rodents bring the count to 14.

“Zenkerella could be seen as the ultimate Pokémon that scientists have still not been able to find or catch alive,” Seiffert said. “After all, it probably only shows up in the middle of the night, deep in the jungles of central Africa, and might spend most of its time way up in tall trees where it would be particularly hard to see.”

Using the three whole-body specimens, scientists sampled Zenkerella‘s DNA for the first time. The study, published in the journal PeerJ on Aug. 16, details how researchers analyzedZenkerella‘s genes using cells from cheek swabs. Then they compared the scaly-tailed squirrels’ DNA with a large sample of other rodents in an online database called GenBank, which includes all rodent suborders and families.

A family divided

Based on DNA results, the researchers determined that, contrary to expectation, Zenkerella is a very distant cousin of two scaly-tailed squirrels with webbing between their legs and elbows that allows them to glide from tree to tree. Thus, Zenkerella, who cannot glide, should be placed in the newly named Zenkerellidae family, researchers said. All three cousins are part of the superfamily of Anomaluroidea, partially because they all have a set of scales on the bottom of their tails that reportedly provide support and traction for tree climbing.

The study adds to a growing body of evidence: Extreme anatomical adaptations that evolved and enabled some mammals to perform tasks such as gliding, flying or swimming are unlikely to be lost or reversed over the course of evolution.

One of only a few ancient ‘living fossils’

Of the about 5,400 mammal species alive today, only Zenkerella insignis and five others are the “sole surviving members of ancient lineages” dating all the way back to the early part of the Eocene epoch, 49 million years ago or more, Seiffert said. Within this select group, onlyZenkerella, the monito del monte (Dromiciops gliroides) and the pen-tailed tree shrew (Ptilocercus lowii) have been given the medal “living fossil.” They closely resemble what is observed in their species’ fossil record. In other words, although they have evolved over time, the changes were minimal.

“It’s an amazing story of survival,” Seiffert said. “In strong contrast to Zenkerella, all of these five other ‘sole survivor’ mammal species have been fairly well studied by scientists. We are only just starting to work on basic descriptions of Zenkerella‘s anatomy. It’s fun to think that there might be other elusive mammalian species out there, deep in the rainforests of central Africa that will be new to science.”

Hunters caught the three Zenkerella specimens in ground snares near the southern tip of Bioko Island off the west coast of Africa. Villagers there said they catch Zenkerella in forest floor traps once or twice a year, but the meat is not desirable. Eyewitnesses said the rodent is nocturnally active and sleeps in tree hollows.

The mystery remains

Scientists still know almost nothing about the unique rodent’s way of life: how it moves, whether it spends most of its time in the trees or on the ground, or what it eats. Future studies will detail Zenkerella‘s anatomy, behavior, diet, ecology and locomotion on Bioko Island.

The lack of knowledge about Zenkerella‘s life history and ecology has led the International Union for Conservation of Nature to categorize the species as “least concern” because it is thought to be distributed over a broad geographical region in central Africa, said Drew Cronin, study co-author and postdoctoral researcher with the Bioko Biodiversity Protection Program at Drexel University.

“This rating belies the fact that threats such as habitat loss and degradation are intense and widespread in central Africa,” Cronin said. “Zenkerella may be under greater threat. The more information and visibility for the species that we can generate, the more likely we are to facilitate the research and conservation attention a unique species like Zenkerella requires.”

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA


The marsupial lion, or Thylacoleo carnifex, was a predator in the Pleistocene era of Australia and was about the same size as a large jaguar.

It was known to have existed from around two-and-a-half-million years ago until as recently as a few tens of thousands of years ago.

The animal is depicted on native Australian cave art and some speculate it still survives as the “Queensland Tiger”.

As its name suggests, the marsupial lion has long been presumed to be a cat-like predator, despite lacking large canine teeth – instead it had large, protruding incisors that have been suggested to be canine substitutes.

Thylacoleo was a powerful beast but, as other researchers have noted, it had limbs of different proportions to a lion, suggesting it was not a fast.

It also sported a very large claw on its hand, similar to the dew claw of cats but of a much bigger size, with a bony sheath foisted on a mobile first digit (thumb).

The new study, published in Paleobiology by Christine Janis, a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the University of Bristol (currently on a leave of absence from a professorship at Brown University, USA) with colleagues Borja Figueirido and Alberto Martín-Serra from the University of Málaga, Spain looked at the elbow joints of a large number of living mammals.

This showed a strong association between the anatomy of the humerus (upper arm bone) where it articulates with the forelimb and the locomotor behaviour of mammals.

Animals more specialized for running (like a dog) have a joint indicating movement limited for back and forwards, stabilising their bodies on the ground, while animals more specialised for climbing (like a monkey) have a joint that allows for rotation of the hand around the elbow. Modern cats, which (unlike dogs) use their forelimbs to grapple with their prey, have an elbow joint of intermediate shape.

Christine Janis said: “If Thylacoleo had hunted like a lion using its forelimbs to manipulate its prey, then its elbow joint should have been lion-like”.

“But, surprisingly, it a unique elbow-joint among living predatory mammals – one that suggested a great deal of rotational capacity of the hand, like an arboreal mammal, but also features not seen in living climbers, that would have stabilized the limb on the ground (suggesting that it was not simply a climber).”

Christine Janis and colleagues proposed that this unique elbow joint, in combination with the huge “dew claw” on a mobile thumb, would have allowed the marsupial lion to use that claw to kill its prey.

In contrast the large incisors were blunt. While Thylacoleo had massive shearing teeth in the back of its jaw, the incisors appear to have functioned better for gripping than for piercing flesh in a killing bite.

They concluded that, unlike a real lion, which holds its prey with its claws, and kills it with its teeth, the marsupial lion – unlike any living predator – used its teeth to hold its prey, while it despatched it with its huge claws.
http://www.heritagedaily.com/2016/08/sc ... als/112484
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby brekin » Wed Aug 17, 2016 6:49 pm

Zenkerella could be seen as the ultimate Pokémon that scientists have still not been able to find or catch alive,” Seiffert said. “After all, it probably only shows up in the middle of the night, deep in the jungles of central Africa, and might spend most of its time way up in tall trees where it would be particularly hard to see.”


That quote. God help us.

Related thread related to the emergence of schizophrenia, primate psychology links to humans, and other misc. Man-Ape psych jibber jabber:

Evolution, religion, schizophrenia & the schizotypal shaman
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=35222

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If I knew all mysteries and all knowledge, and have not charity, I am nothing. St. Paul
I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind. Eric Hoffer
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Dec 16, 2016 5:33 pm

Neanderthals Turned to Faith When Confronting Death, New Evidence Suggests

We aren't sure whether they could speak, let alone intone liturgy over their dead in the light of controlled fires, but a child's burial site in Spain suggests they might well have, say archaeologists.

Ruth Schuster Dec 15, 2016 1:07 PM


The recent discovery of possible elaborate funeral rites by Neanderthal cavemen has begged the question of whether these primitive cousins of Man had religion. Not to mention, whether they could control fire.
The latest discovery suggesting that Neanderthals were not beetle-browed brutes is the seemingly intentional burial of a child about 40,000 years ago, in a cave some 100 kilometers from Madrid. The burial site of the so-called Loyoza Child was surrounded by hearths, in each of which the archaeologists found bones, antlers and nearby, one rhino skull. The child itself had been two to three years old and seems to have had its body burned. The team feels the fires could have been ceremonial rather than functional.
The fire for the child's body and hearths could have been collected serendipitously, for instance, from bushfires created by lightning, as primitive hominins did for hundreds of thousands of years at least. (Where and when primitive man learned to control fire, as opposed to merely taking advantage of it, remains hotly contested.) The bones could be the remains of animals who had been cooked on the fires and eaten.  And, like today's teenagers, Neanderthals could have been the sort of slobs who leave the bones in the cave.
Or the cave dwellers may have had elaborate mortuary rites, which could indicate that they cherished their dead, which could in turn indicate spiritual depths.
While researchers disagree about Neanderthal use of fire in Europe, here in the Levant, researchers have long been convinced that Neanderthals used it regularly, Prof. Erella Hovers of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem told Haaretz. "On this the archaeological evidence in Israel and Syria is categorical," she wrote by email.
They also believe that, like primitive humans, at least some of the Neanderthals buried their dead some of the time, with intentionality, an inference based on the positioning of bodies, seeming funerary offerings and more, Hovers adds. (She also points out that there's no suggestion that every Homo sapiens from the middle Paleolithic, between 100,000 and 40,000 years ago, was intentionally buried by mourning kinfolk). She also points out that the proof the child in question was in fact Neanderthal remains outstanding.
Not necessarily a sentimental bunch
Its Neanderthal identification being as it may, the Loyoza Child is not the only postulated Neanderthal funeral. In 2013, archaeologists reported on evidence of a Neanderthal burial in at the site of La Chapelle-aux-Saints in France. Whether the French Neanderthal was intentionally buried there is another question, but the archaeologists felt the evidence showed that he was. Another Neanderthal child was found in a cave in Roc de Marsal, Dordogne, from about 70,000 years ago, and was postulated to be a deliberate burial.
In Israel, in 1992 the articulated partial skeleton of a Neanderthal infant was excavated, in Amud Cave: based on its state of protection and preservation versus that of other faunal remains in the cave, the archaeologists concluded it had been purposefully buried.
"Assuming it was Neanderthal, I think I have to agree with [the researching archaeologist] Chris Stringer, that the discovery demonstrates much more complex behavior than had been documented until today in Neanderthal burials," Hovers sums up.

Remains of Neanderthal child, believed to be about 3 years old, found in Roc de Marsal: Also believed to have been ceremoniously interred.Don Hitchcock 2014, Wikimedia Commons
If so, the Neanderthal had the capacity to recognize death and mark it, as opposed for instance to leaving the body where it lay for scavengers to eat. Or to eat themselves. At least some Neanderthals did not cavil at cannibalism, for example going by evidence found in Belgium. At yet other sites, there is evidence that Neanderthals unromantically used the bones of their dead to sharpen their stone tools.
Just how sophisticated were they, the Neanderthals?
In practice, we don't even know if they could speak. Recent excavations have discovered that the Neanderthals had hyoid (tongue) bones like humans.  "In my opinion, that hyoid bone isn't what will tell us if they spoke or not," cautions Prof. Yoel Rak of Tel Aviv University, expert on Neanderthal anatomy. "That is, the Neanderthal bone is very different from that of the chimp and very much like ours. But based on to similarity– they could speak."
Certainly, we know that the Neanderthal brain was as big as ours or even bigger, Rak adds. And crucially, Neanderthals had the right gene for speech, FOXp2, just like we do. Chimpanzees for instance have FOXp2 but it differs from the human version.
Intriguingly, Rak points out, humans born with "pathological" FOXp2 can't understand speech. "To cut to the chase, we and the Neanderthals have exactly the same gene without the pathology.  This could lead us to conclude that they could speak," he happily speculates.
Even if they didn't, they could have communicated in any number of ways, he points out. "We can also speak in sign language. Even Homo sapiens has for instance click languages where communication is effected but not through the voice box. Or there are whistles," Rak says.
Ergo, he sums up, the ability to communicate and to exchange thoughts is intellectual, not anatomic.
Another sign of sophistication could be art. But the general consensus over "Neanderthal art" is that there was none.
The one possible sign of Neanderthals being abstractly artistic is a 55,000-year old flute made out of a young cave bear's bone found in 1995 in Slovenia, says Rak. (He's not a great believer in the famous cross-hatched "Neanderthal engraving" in Gibraltar.)
Some believe it wasn't musically minded prehistoric men who made the holes in the flute, but hyenas. Yet others point out that the bone flute makes beautiful music, which hyenas don't care about.

A Neanderthal flute, or a hyena's chew toy?Wikimedia Commons
Speaking of tools, another relevant argument in archaeological circles is who taught who to use lissoirs, tools still used today in leather working. Archaeologists thought Man invented the lissoir and that Neanderthals poached the idea shortly before going extinct. But in 2013, archaeologists working in Grosse Grotte, Germany discovered lissoirs in a Neanderthal context preceding the time when humans supplanted their thicker-bodied cousins. They are the oldest-known specialized bone tools in Europe and indicate that the Neanderthals invented them and we were the ones who borrowed the idea.
Spirituality on and in my mind
So maybe they could speak and play music; paintings are unknown; but did they have spirituality? Could they have believed in God? gods? The morrow, or even an afterlife?
When Homo sapiens began believing in deities is not known. Some think that a rock with carved bits looking very, very vaguely like a large snake, found in a Botswana cave, depicts a god worshipped by the predecessors of the Sana people 70,000 years ago.  Evidence of ritualistic behavior at the site includes spearheads that seem to have been deliberately burned or broken, which would be an odd thing to do without a ritualistic context.
The prehistoric Botswanans may well have been predisposed to believe in a python god or divine porcupine or whatever. So may Neanderthals. A predisposition to believe seems to be hard-wired into homo brains.
The neurological basis theory has been making the rounds since at least 2008, based on brain scans of praying people and the observation that social activity, like burning pagans together or going to synagogue, leads to the release of feel-good juice, a.k.a., serotonin. Worship, with or without ecstasy, is a relatively low-energy way to produce that serotonin that we crave. And, our brain biochemistry receives backing from none other than our egos: the world was created for us!
Faith might also arise from our brains resorting to illogic to find "order" in the dismaying chaos around us. We like order. Neanderthals may have too.
Some psychologists insist faith is pathological, in that it involves irrationality and even malignancy: just think of the mass murders in the name of religion. Who knows, maybe it's even how Neanderthals, some of them, some of the time, wound up eating their dead.

read more: http://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/1.758960
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Dec 29, 2016 9:29 pm

Graham Hancock Explains The Neanderthal History

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxHS-pQTan8

Neanderthal vs The Academic Lie - Graham Hancock 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjsmnIrYvWk

The fate of Neanderthal genes
December 25, 20164524

Modern humans and Neanderthals interbred tens of thousands of years ago. New work shows how the difference in population size has led to genes that survived in Neanderthals being removed from the modern human genome.
The Neanderthals disappeared about 30,000 years ago, but little pieces of them live on in the form of DNA sequences scattered through the modern human genome.

A new study by geneticists at the University of California, Davis, shows why these traces of our closest relatives are slowly being removed by natural selection.

“On average, there has been weak but widespread selection against Neanderthal genes,” said Graham Coop, professor in the UC Davis Department of Evolution and Ecology and Center for Population Biology, and senior author on a paper describing the work published Nov. 8 in the journal PLOS Genetics.

That selection seems to be a consequence of a small population of Neanderthals mixing with a much larger population of modern humans.

Neanderthals split from our African ancestors over half a million years ago, and lived in Europe and Central Asia until a few tens of thousands of years ago. Archaeological discoveries have shown that they had quite a sophisticated culture, Coop said. Thanks to DNA samples retrieved from a number of fossils, we have enough data on the Neanderthal genome to identify their genes among ours.

When modern humans left Africa about 50,000 to 80,000 years ago and spread through Europe and Asia, they interbred with Neanderthals. The first hybrid offspring would have been, on average, a 50-50 mix of modern human and Neanderthal genes, and could then have themselves bred with modern humans, Neanderthals or other hybrids.

So what happened to the Neanderthal DNA? Today, Neanderthal genes are a few percent of the genome of people of European ancestry, a little more common in people of East Asian descent, and almost absent in people of African ancestry.

Coop and postdoctoral researchers Ivan Juric and Simon Aeschbacher devised methods to measure the degree of natural selection acting on Neanderthal DNA in the human genome.

One hypothesis has been that Neanderthals quickly became genetically incompatible with modern humans, so their hybrid offspring were not “fit” in evolutionary terms – they either failed to thrive or were not fertile.

Weak but widespread selection against Neanderthal genes

The researchers found something different. Rather than showing strong selection against a few Neanderthal genes, they found weak, but widespread selection against many Neanderthal DNA sequences that is slowly removing them from our genome.

Coop said that’s consistent with a small, isolated population of Neanderthals mixing with a much larger population of modern humans. Inbreeding in small populations means that genetic variants can remain common even if they’re harmful to some degree. But when they mix into a larger population, natural selection starts to act against those variants and weed them out.

“The human population size has historically been much larger, and this is important since selection is more efficient at removing deleterious variants in large populations,” Juric said. “Weakly deleterious variants that could persist in Neanderthals could not persist in humans. We think that this simple explanation can account for the pattern of Neanderthal ancestry that we see today along the genome of modern humans.”

The findings are consistent with other recently published work. If Neanderthals had been more numerous when modern humans encountered them, we might have a different mix of Neanderthal and human genes, Juric said.

The work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Juric is currently at 23andMe Inc., Mountain View, California.
https://knowridge.com/2016/12/the-fate- ... hal-genes/
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Jan 02, 2017 8:44 pm

The caves that prove Neanderthals were cannibals
December 30, 2016

Deep in the caves of Goyet in Belgium researchers have found the grisly evidence that the Neanderthals did not just feast on horses or reindeer, but also on each other.
Human bones from a newborn, a child and four adults or teenagers who lived around 40,000 years ago show clear signs of cutting and of fractures to extract the marrow within, they say.
"It is irrefutable, cannibalism was practised here," says Belgian archaeologist Christian Casseyas as he looks inside a cave halfway up a valley in this site in the Ardennes forest.
The bones in Goyet date from when Neanderthals were nearing the end of their time on earth before being replaced by Homo sapiens, with whom they also interbred.
Once regarded as primitive cavemen driven to extinction by smarter modern humans, studies have found that Neanderthals were actually sophisticated beings who took care of the bodies of the deceased and held burial rituals.
But there is a growing body of proof that they also ate their dead.
Neanderthal bone fragments
Cases of Neanderthal cannibalism have been found until now only in Neanderthal populations in southern Europe in Spain, at El Sidron and Zafarraya, and in France, at Moula-Guercy and Les Pradelles.
The caves at Goyet have been occupied since the Paleolithic era. The 250-metre- (820-feet-) long galleries were dug into the limestone by the Samson, a small stream that still flows a few metres below.
They began to reveal their secrets in the middle of the 19th century thanks to one of the fathers of palaeontology, Edouard Dupont (1841-1911).
A geologist and director of the Royal Museum of Natural History of Belgium, he searched several caves, including that of Goyet in 1867, and collected an enormous quantity of bones and tools.
Just a few years after Charles Darwin first expounded his theory of evolution, Dupont published the results of his own research in his book "Man During the Stone Age".
But his discoveries remained in the archives of the museum (now called the Brussels Institute of Natural Sciences) for more than a century.
That was until 2004, when the institute's head of anthropology Patrick Semal discovered, hidden in amongst the drawers of what Dupont thought were human bones, a jaw tip that clearly belonged to a Neanderthal.
Scientists have since been painstakingly sorting through fragments that Dupont thought were animal bones to see if there are other traces of ancient man.
'Extract the marrow'
Now an international team led by Helene Rougier, an anthropologist at California State University Northridge in the United States, has proved from the bones found at Goyet that the Neanderthals there were cannibals.
The bones show traces of cutting, "to disarticulate and remove the flesh," said Christian Casseyas, who also leads tours for the public at the caves.
The Neanderthals "broke these bones in the same way that they broke those of the reindeer and horses found at the entrance of the cave, certainly to extract the marrow", he adds.
Rougier, whose work on the Belgian cave was published last July by Scientific Reports, a journal of the Nature group, told AFP that "indeed, we can conclude that some Neanderthals died and were eaten here", which is a first in Northern Europe.
"Some of these bones have also been used to make tools to touch up the edges of flints to re-sharpen them," says Rougier.
But the reasons for the cannibalism remain a mystery, as to the extent to which the Neanderthals ate their dead.
"Was it systematic? Was it only at certain particular moments?" she asks. "I don't know how to interpret the reason behind this cannibalism. It can be purely food, but it can also be symbolic ... The reason remains open," she says.

http://phys.org/news/2016-12-caves-nean ... s.html#jCp
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 09, 2017 1:33 pm

Some Neanderthals Were Vegetarian — And They Likely Kissed Our Human Ancestors

March 8, 20177:11 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
RHITU CHATTERJEE

A new study of the dental plaques of three Neanderthals reveals surprising facts about their lives, including what they ate, the diseases that ailed them and how they self-medicated (and smooched). (Above) An illustration of Neanderthals in Spain shows them preparing to eat plants and mushrooms.

Now, it's no surprise that Neanderthals didn't brush their teeth. Nor did they go to the dentist.

That means bits of food and the microbes in their mouths just stayed stuck to their teeth. While not so good for dental hygiene, these dental plaques are a great resource for scientists interested in understanding more about Neanderthal diet and lifestyle.

Luckily for researchers, there is an abundance of Neanderthal teeth in the fossil record. "We have complete jaws with teeth, we have upper jaws with skulls with teeth intact, isolated teeth," says Keith Dobney, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool.

He and his colleagues have been studying Neanderthal dental plaques — or rather, the hardened version of plaque, tartar, or what scientists call dental calculus. They scraped off some of the calculus and analyzed the DNA that was preserved in it for clues to what the Neanderthals ate.

They looked at plaques from the teeth of three Neanderthals living in Europe about 50,000 years ago. One individual was from a cave in Spy, Belgium, and the other two were from El Sidrón cave in Spain.

The Belgian individual ate mostly meat. "We found evidence of woolly rhino. We found the DNA of wild sheep," says Dobney.

The Spy Cave site in Belgium from which several Neanderthal skeletons were excavated in 1886. Only one skeleton was used in this study.
Courtesy of Royal Belgian Institute of Nature Sciences

The researchers also found evidence of mushrooms, but this was certainly a meat lover. This isn't that surprising to scientists who study Neanderthal diets. After all, the butchered bones of woolly rhinos, mammoths, horses and reindeer had been found in the Spy cave and other sites, suggesting a meat-heavy diet.

There had also been other indirect sources of evidence of carnivory, like high levels of a certain nitrogen isotopes, which suggested meat- and/or mushroom-heavy diets.

"Most Neanderthals that had been analyzed [before] were really heavy meat eaters," says Laura Weyrich, at the Australian Center for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and the lead author on the new study. She says those previous studies had suggested that "Neanderthals were as carnivorous as polar bears."

And this is where the new study offered a big surprise. According to the DNA in dental plaques, the Neanderthals in Spain ate no meat at all.

"We find things like pine nuts, moss, tree barks and even mushrooms as well," says Weyrich. "It is very indicative of a vegetarian diet, probably the true Paleo diet." (Not all of the region's Neanderthals were necessarily vegetarians: The El Sidrón cave also contained grisly evidence of cannibalism.)

She says the difference in diets reflects the fact that the two groups lived in two very different environments.

Neanderthal Dinner: Reindeer With A Side Of Cannibalism
THE SALT

Northern Europe, including Belgium, had wide open spaces with grasslands and many mammals. "It would have been very grassy, and kind of mountainous," says Weyrich. "You can imagine a big woolly rhino wandering through the grass there." Perhaps tracked by hungry Neanderthals looking for dinner.

But farther south in Spain, the Neanderthals lived in dense forests. "It's hard to imagine a big woolly rhino trying to wedge themselves between the trees," says Weyrich. And so, she says the Neanderthals there feasted on all kinds of plants and mushrooms. "They're very opportunistic, trying to find anything that's edible in their environment."

"Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Neanderthals are adapting to local conditions and varying their diets," says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London. He studies human origins, but wasn't involved in the new study.

For example, Neanderthals living on the coast of Gibraltar "were collecting molluscs and baking them," he says. "They were butchering at least one seal. There [was] dolphin material at the site. That may have been stranded dolphin that they scavenged."


The complete jaw of a Neanderthal individual found in Spy, Belgium. Small and thin tartar deposits provided the researchers with enough DNA sequences to study.
Courtesy of Royal Belgian Institute of Nature Sciences

Stringer says it was the Neanderthals' adaptability that allowed them to thrive for tens of thousands of years across Europe and Asia.

"They were very evolved humans," he says. "They lived over a range of very different environments. They lived in different climatic conditions."

But Stringer cautions that the new study's findings probably don't reflect everything about the diets of these Neanderthals. "Not everything that you eat has an equal chance of getting incorporated into the calculus," he says. "And not everything has a chance of being preserved long term."

Perhaps more surprising than the clues about diets is what the DNA revealed about other aspects of Neanderthal life. The scientists uncovered the identities of more than 200 different species of microbes that lived in the mouths of these Neanderthals. It also gave clues to some diseases that might have ailed them.

One of the individuals in Spain seems to have had a painful tooth abscess and was suffering from a stomach bug. "We saw that he also had Microsporidia, which is a gastrointestinal pathogen," says Weyrich.

That means he probably had diarrhea and was throwing up. "He was a sick individual," says Weyrich. "He was a young adolescent male. He was mostly with ... females. So we like to think of him as this sick boy that the females were dragging along with them."

But what's more remarkable, she says, is that DNA in his dental plaque suggests he was self-medicating by eating the bark of poplar trees. "And poplar bark contains salicylic acid, one of the natural sources of what we call aspirin," she says.

Even more surprising was that they also found evidence of Penicillium in his plaque. That's the mold that makes the antibiotic penicillin. "It's pretty phenomenal that these guys were so in tune with their environment and to know what was going on and how to treat things," says Weyrich.


A dental calculus deposit is visible on the rear molar (right). The teeth belong to the sick boy in the Spanish cave. He was eating poplar, a source of aspirin, and vegetation with mold, including the fungus Penicillium, which is the source of the antibiotic penicillin.
Courtesy of Paleoanthropology Group MNCN-CSIC

But the surprises didn't end there. Weyrich and her colleagues also identified the DNA of a microbe that causes gum disease in humans today. "We were able to track back that this particular microorganism was actually obtained from humans, likely about 120,000 years ago." Weyrich and her colleagues don't believe the microbe caused disease in Neanderthals, but they think it tells a fascinating story about how the two species — our ancestors and Neanderthals — interacted.

Genetics has shown that the two interbred and swapped genes. "A lot of these breeding interactions had been thought to be rough interactions, something that wouldn't be sensual or enjoyable," says Weyrich. But if they were swapping microbes in their mouths, that suggests a different story: "It suggests that there's kissing — or at least food sharing — going on between these two groups. So we really think that those interactions were probably more friendly, and much more intimate, than what anyone ever imagined before."

Weyrich and her colleagues think that in the years to come, we will learn a lot more about Neanderthals and other human ancestors, just by studying the ancient DNA trapped in their dental plaques.

"It's a very exciting paper," says Jean-Jacques Hublin at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who was not involved in the new study. "It opens a new window into the past, a new way to investigate [the] life and behavior of Neanderthals."
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/201 ... -ancestors
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Mar 16, 2017 12:28 pm

Neanderthals 'self-medicated' for pain
By Helen Briggs
BBC News
8 March 2017

Neanderthals are our closest extinct relatives
Neanderthals dosed themselves with painkillers and possibly penicillin, according to a study of their teeth.
One sick Neanderthal chewed the bark of the poplar tree, which contains a chemical related to aspirin.
He may also have been using penicillin, long before antibiotics were developed.
The evidence comes from ancient DNA found in the dental tartar of Neanderthals living about 40,000 years ago in central Europe.
Microbes and food stuck to the teeth of the ancient hominins gives scientists a window into the past.
By sequencing DNA preserved in dental tartar, international researchers have found out new details of the diet, lifestyle and health of our closest extinct relatives.
"Their behaviour and their diet looks a lot more sophisticated and a lot more like us in many ways," said Prof Alan Cooper, director of the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA.
"You know, we've got a guy self-medicating either because he's got a dental abscess, which was bad, or a nasty gastrointestinal parasite, which was also bad, either way he wasn't a happy guy.
"And, here he is eating aspirin and we're finding penicillin mould in him."
Penicillium fungus on a petri dishImage copyrightSPL
Image caption
Penicillium fungus on a petri dish
The Neanderthal's abscess left a trace on his jawbone. The intestinal parasite was identified through studying DNA in dental tartar.
It appears the Neanderthals had a good knowledge of medicinal plants and how these might relieve the pain of toothache or stomach ache. They might also have used antibiotics, long before the medicines were developed in modern times.
"The use of antibiotics would be very surprising, as this is more than 40,000 years before we developed penicillin," said Prof Cooper.
"Certainly our findings contrast markedly with the rather simplistic view of our ancient relatives in popular imagination."
Window on the past
The research also gives new details of the diet of Neanderthals. Neanderthals at a cave site in Belgium were prolific meat eaters, dining on rhinoceros and wild sheep supplemented with mushrooms. Others, living further south in Spain, were largely vegans, consuming moss, bark and pine nuts.
This DNA evidence contradicts archaeological and isotopic data suggesting Neanderthals were as carnivorous as polar bears or wolves, with a diet largely based on reindeer, woolly mammoth and woolly rhinoceros.
The researchers also examined bacteria that lived in the mouths of Neanderthals to see how microbial flora has changed over time. In the process, they reconstructed the oldest microbial genome yet sequenced - a bacteria associated with gum disease that is 48,000 years old.
They discovered that the collection of bacteria in the mouths of ancient populations seems to be linked to the amount of meat in the diet.
"This extraordinary window on the past is providing us with new ways to explore and understand our evolutionary history through the microorganisms that lived in us and with us," said Prof Keith Dobney, from the University of Liverpool, a co-researcher on the study.
Neanderthals lived between about 400,000 and 40,000 years ago in Europe and southwestern to central Asia.
They occasionally interbred with modern humans, meaning their genes live on today.
The research is published in the journal Nature.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39205530


Some Neanderthals Were Vegetarian — And They Likely Kissed Our Human Ancestors

March 8, 20177:11 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
RHITU CHATTERJEE

A new study of the dental plaques of three Neanderthals reveals surprising facts about their lives, including what they ate, the diseases that ailed them and how they self-medicated (and smooched). (Above) An illustration of Neanderthals in Spain shows them preparing to eat plants and mushrooms.
Courtesy of Abel Grau/Comunicación CSIC
Now, it's no surprise that Neanderthals didn't brush their teeth. Nor did they go to the dentist.

That means bits of food and the microbes in their mouths just stayed stuck to their teeth. While not so good for dental hygiene, these dental plaques are a great resource for scientists interested in understanding more about Neanderthal diet and lifestyle.

Luckily for researchers, there is an abundance of Neanderthal teeth in the fossil record. "We have complete jaws with teeth, we have upper jaws with skulls with teeth intact, isolated teeth," says Keith Dobney, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool.

He and his colleagues have been studying Neanderthal dental plaques — or rather, the hardened version of plaque, tartar, or what scientists call dental calculus. They scraped off some of the calculus and analyzed the DNA that was preserved in it for clues to what the Neanderthals ate.

They looked at plaques from the teeth of three Neanderthals living in Europe about 50,000 years ago. One individual was from a cave in Spy, Belgium, and the other two were from El Sidrón cave in Spain.

As they report in a study published in this week's Nature, the Belgian individual ate mostly meat. "We found evidence of woolly rhino. We found the DNA of wild sheep," says Dobney.

The Spy Cave site in Belgium from which several Neanderthal skeletons were excavated in 1886. Only one skeleton was used in this study.
Courtesy of Royal Belgian Institute of Nature Sciences
The researchers also found evidence of mushrooms, but this was certainly a meat lover. This isn't that surprising to scientists who study Neanderthal diets. After all, the butchered bones of woolly rhinos, mammoths, horses and reindeer had been found in the Spy cave and other sites, suggesting a meat-heavy diet.

There had also been other indirect sources of evidence of carnivory, like high levels of a certain nitrogen isotopes, which suggested meat- and/or mushroom-heavy diets.

"Most Neanderthals that had been analyzed [before] were really heavy meat eaters," says Laura Weyrich, at the Australian Center for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and the lead author on the new study. She says those previous studies had suggested that "Neanderthals were as carnivorous as polar bears."

And this is where the new study offered a big surprise. According to the DNA in dental plaques, the Neanderthals in Spain ate no meat at all.

"We find things like pine nuts, moss, tree barks and even mushrooms as well," says Weyrich. "It is very indicative of a vegetarian diet, probably the true Paleo diet." (Not all of the region's Neanderthals were necessarily vegetarians: The El Sidrón cave also contained grisly evidence of cannibalism.)

She says the difference in diets reflects the fact that the two groups lived in two very different environments.

Northern Europe, including Belgium, had wide open spaces with grasslands and many mammals. "It would have been very grassy, and kind of mountainous," says Weyrich. "You can imagine a big woolly rhino wandering through the grass there." Perhaps tracked by hungry Neanderthals looking for dinner.

But farther south in Spain, the Neanderthals lived in dense forests. "It's hard to imagine a big woolly rhino trying to wedge themselves between the trees," says Weyrich. And so, she says the Neanderthals there feasted on all kinds of plants and mushrooms. "They're very opportunistic, trying to find anything that's edible in their environment."

"Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that Neanderthals are adapting to local conditions and varying their diets," says Chris Stringer at the Natural History Museum in London. He studies human origins, but wasn't involved in the new study.

For example, Neanderthals living on the coast of Gibraltar "were collecting molluscs and baking them," he says. "They were butchering at least one seal. There [was] dolphin material at the site. That may have been stranded dolphin that they scavenged."

Image
The complete jaw of a Neanderthal individual found in Spy, Belgium. Small and thin tartar deposits provided the researchers with enough DNA sequences to study.
Courtesy of Royal Belgian Institute of Nature Sciences
Stringer says it was the Neanderthals' adaptability that allowed them to thrive for tens of thousands of years across Europe and Asia.

"They were very evolved humans," he says. "They lived over a range of very different environments. They lived in different climatic conditions."

But Stringer cautions that the new study's findings probably don't reflect everything about the diets of these Neanderthals. "Not everything that you eat has an equal chance of getting incorporated into the calculus," he says. "And not everything has a chance of being preserved long term."

Itchy Eyes? Sneezing? Maybe Blame That Allergy On Neanderthals
SHOTS - HEALTH NEWS
Itchy Eyes? Sneezing? Maybe Blame That Allergy On Neanderthals
Perhaps more surprising than the clues about diets is what the DNA revealed about other aspects of Neanderthal life. The scientists uncovered the identities of more than 200 different species of microbes that lived in the mouths of these Neanderthals. It also gave clues to some diseases that might have ailed them.

One of the individuals in Spain seems to have had a painful tooth abscess and was suffering from a stomach bug. "We saw that he also had Microsporidia, which is a gastrointestinal pathogen," says Weyrich.

That means he probably had diarrhea and was throwing up. "He was a sick individual," says Weyrich. "He was a young adolescent male. He was mostly with ... females. So we like to think of him as this sick boy that the females were dragging along with them."

But what's more remarkable, she says, is that DNA in his dental plaque suggests he was self-medicating by eating the bark of poplar trees. "And poplar bark contains salicylic acid, one of the natural sources of what we call aspirin," she says.

Even more surprising was that they also found evidence of Penicillium in his plaque. That's the mold that makes the antibiotic penicillin. "It's pretty phenomenal that these guys were so in tune with their environment and to know what was going on and how to treat things," says Weyrich.


Enlarge this image
A dental calculus deposit is visible on the rear molar (right). The teeth belong to the sick boy in the Spanish cave. He was eating poplar, a source of aspirin, and vegetation with mold, including the fungus Penicillium, which is the source of the antibiotic penicillin.
Courtesy of Paleoanthropology Group MNCN-CSIC
But the surprises didn't end there. Weyrich and her colleagues also identified the DNA of a microbe that causes gum disease in humans today. "We were able to track back that this particular microorganism was actually obtained from humans, likely about 120,000 years ago." Weyrich and her colleagues don't believe the microbe caused disease in Neanderthals, but they think it tells a fascinating story about how the two species — our ancestors and Neanderthals — interacted.

Genetics has shown that the two interbred and swapped genes. "A lot of these breeding interactions had been thought to be rough interactions, something that wouldn't be sensual or enjoyable," says Weyrich. But if they were swapping microbes in their mouths, that suggests a different story: "It suggests that there's kissing — or at least food sharing — going on between these two groups. So we really think that those interactions were probably more friendly, and much more intimate, than what anyone ever imagined before."

Weyrich and her colleagues think that in the years to come, we will learn a lot more about Neanderthals and other human ancestors, just by studying the ancient DNA trapped in their dental plaques.

"It's a very exciting paper," says Jean-Jacques Hublin at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who was not involved in the new study. "It opens a new window into the past, a new way to investigate [the] life and behavior of Neanderthals."
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/201 ... -ancestors
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Apr 28, 2017 4:18 pm

Long After Their Bones Were Gone, Neanderthals' DNA Survived in a Cave
By Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor | April 27, 2017 02:06pm ET

Scientists found DNA related to the extinct human lineage called Denisovans in Denisova Cave in Siberia. Here, Richard (Bert) Roberts, Vladimir Ulianov and Maxim Kozlikin (clockwise from top) plan the sampling of sediments in the cave's east chamber.
Credit: IAET SB RAS/Sergei Zelensky
DNA from two extinct human relatives — the Neanderthals, and a mysterious branch of humanity called the Denisovans — has been detected in the ancient mud of caves, even though those caves hold no fossils of those individuals, new research shows.

The finding suggests that scientists could detect such extinct lineages in places devoid of skeletal remains, the researchers said. This technique, if verified, could fill blank spots in scientists' understanding of how and where humans evolved, according to the authors of the new study describing the finding. [Denisovan Gallery: Tracing the Genetics of Human Ancestors]

Human remains are scarce

The ancestors of modern humans once shared the world with archaic human lineages such as the Neanderthals — the closest extinct relatives of modern humans — as well as the Denisovans. Little is known about the Denisovans, but scientists think this ancient human relative might have roamed a vast range stretching from Siberia to Southeast Asia. DNA extracted from fossilized bones and teeth of Neanderthals and Denisovans has revealed many secrets about human evolution, such as how modern humans interbred with both lineages.

But although there are numerous prehistoric sites that hold tools and other artifacts from ancient humans — such as the ancestors of modern humans, or members of extinct human lineages — their skeletal remains are scarce, thus limiting research into human evolution. Moreover, the ancient human fossils that archaeologists do unearth do not always have enough suitable DNA for genetic analysis.

"Humans are a very small proportion of the fauna found in caves," said study senior author Matthias Meyer, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "In most excavation sites, if you find thousands of bones from animals, you're very lucky if you find one human tooth or a long-bone fragment."

No bones, no problem

Scientists took samples from different layers of this sediment profile in Trou Al'Wesse cave in Belgium. They ran genetic analyses on the samples.

Instead, Meyer and his colleagues investigated whether ancient sediments found in caves might latch on to DNA. "We know that with DNA preserved in bones, the DNA binds to the mineral component of bone, so the same can, in principle, happen in sediments full of minerals," Meyer said.

The scientists collected 85 samples of sediment covering a time span from 14,000 to more than 550,000 years ago, from seven sites in Belgium, France, Spain, Croatia and Russia, where previous research suggested ancient humans once lived. These sites included Denisova Cave in Siberia, which is where Denisovan fossils were first discovered.

The researchers identified DNA from a variety of mammals, including woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, cave bears and cave hyenas. Mixed in with this animal DNA were small traces of human DNA: The researchers found Neanderthal DNA in four caves, and Denisovan DNA in Denisova Cave.

"The fact that sediment can indeed preserve DNA from extinct humans that lived there thousands of years ago is a pretty amazing finding," Meyer said.

In addition, at each of the two sites where the researchers did not discover DNA from ancient humans, they had only a few samples to analyze, Meyer noted. "Maybe if we looked at more samples from each site, we'd find Neanderthal or Denisovan DNA as well," he said.

DNA potential

The scientists aren't sure what part of the bodies of the extinct human lineages this DNA came from — for instance, skin flakes, hairs or bodily fluids such as sweat or blood. "Another possibility stems from how, in many sites, we find a lot of hyena DNA," Meyer said. "Maybe the hyenas were eating human corpses outside the caves, and went into the caves and left feces there, and maybe entrapped in the hyena feces was human DNA."

Most of the DNA from extinct humans that was recovered came from layers of sediment where no human fossils had been found previously. This suggests that, in the future, DNA could help researchers detect the presence of humans even in the absence of their skeletal remains, the study authors said.

For instance, "there are some very interesting open questions regarding the Denisovans — we only have fossils of them from a single site in Russia, but we know they must have been much more widespread due to the pattern of interbreeding we see with modern humans," Meyer said. "By looking for DNA, there's the chance we can find many more Denisovan sites than we would by just looking for bones or teeth."

One concern, however, is that DNA could seep across layers of sediment, thus making it difficult to figure out when, specifically, extinct humans or others lived at a site. (The deeper a layer of sediment is, the older it usually is.)

Still, the research team "didn't find any obvious evidence of DNA movement," Meyer said, "but it's certainly a possibility that needs to be investigated for every site."

Depending on how well DNA is preserved in any given cave, scientists "could learn much more information," Meyer added. "There's big potential here," he said, "and we need to do more work to understand just how big that potential is."

The scientists detailed their findings online today (April 27) in the journal Science.

Originally published on Live Science.
http://www.livescience.com/58872-neande ... e-mud.html
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Jun 16, 2017 12:36 pm

Study sheds light on Neanderthal-Homo sapiens transition
June 14, 2017
Study sheds light on Neanderthal-Homo sapiens transition

Image

A stone tool thought to be a speartip made from radiolarite sourced over 100km to the east of the cave. Credit: Miroslav Kralík
Archaeologists at The Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Sydney have provided a window into one of the most exciting periods in human history - the transition between Neanderthals and modern humans.

An archaeological dig in a cave in the Moravian region of the Czech Republic has provided a timeline of evidence from 10 sedimentary layers spanning 28,000 to 50,000 years ago. This is the period when our modern human ancestors first arrived in Europe.
The dig, in a cave near the Czech border with Austria and around 150kms north of Vienna, has unearthed over 20,000 animal bones as well as stone tools, weapons and an engraved bone bead that is the oldest of its kind in Central Europe.
ANU archaeologist Dr Duncan Wright said the project was so important because it gives some of the earliest evidence of modern human activity in the region. This was a period when humans were moving substantial distances and bringing with them portable art objects.
"In the early layers the items we've found are locally made flakes, possibly used by small communities living and hunting in the vicinity to kill animals or prepare food, but around 40,000 years ago we start to see objects coming from long distances away," Dr Wright said.
"Dating from this same time we unearthed a bead made from mammal bone. This is the oldest portable art object of its type found anywhere in central Europe and provides evidence of social signalling, quite possibly used as a necklace to mark the identity of the wearer.
"So between these two periods, we've either seen a change in behaviour and human movement or possibly even a change in species."
Archaeologist Ladislav Nejman of the University of Sydney said one of the biggest questions is the beginnings of human exploration of this landscape by Homo sapiens who arrived in this area for the first time.
"We've found that somewhere between 40-48,000 years ago people became highly mobile," Dr Nejman said.
"Instead of moving short distances near the cave where they lived, they were walking for hundreds of kilometres quite often. We know that because we found various artefacts where the raw material comes from 100-200 kilometres away.
"The artefacts were also made of different materials from different regions. Some from the North-West, some from the North, some from the East."
However in layer 10, which represents an earlier time period between 48-45,000 years ago, all the recovered stone artefacts were made using local raw material, which indicates that the high residential mobility came later.
Dr Nejman said the study also revealed valuable new information about the climate of the region.
"We haven't had such a long sequence of sedimentary layers before that we could test," he said.
"The climate changed quite often from warmer to colder, and vice versa, but at all times it was much colder than the interglacial period that we have lived in for the past 10,000 years."
Samples from the site have been sent through for analysis using a new technique, called ancient sediment DNA analysis. This is the first scientific method that can detect which species were present even without the bones of these species. It tests remnant DNA preserved in the sediment.
Dr Wright said the results will shed new light on a period of transition between two species of humans and also give clearer evidence about the activities of our modern human ancestors in a period and region where little is known.
"We can tell by the artefacts that small groups of people camped at this cave. This was during glacial periods suggesting they were well adapted to these harsh conditions" Dr Wright said.
"It's quite possible that the two different species of humans met in this area."
https://phys.org/news/2017-06-neanderth ... n.html#jCp



THE NEANDERTHALS, CONDUCTED MUCH OF THEIR ACTIVITIES IN THE OPEN LANDSCAPE ACCORDING TO A STUDY BY AN INTERNATIONAL TEAM LEAD BY ISRAELI RESEARCHERS.

Neanderthals in the Levant constituted a resilient population that survived successfully in caves and open landscapes 60,000 years ago, when dispersing modern humans reached the region.

The study was led by Dr. Ella Been from the Ono Academic College, Prof. Erella Hovers from the Institute of archaeology of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Dr. Omry Barzilai from the Israel Antiquities Authority, with the assistance of Dr. Ravid Ekshtain (the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Dr. Ariel Malinsky-Buller (the Museum for Human Behavioral Evolution, Monrepos, Germany). The research was financed by the company Derekh Eretz Inc. as part of a major road construction.

The study focused on the skeletal remains of two human individuals from the open-air site of ‘Ein Qashish, on the banks of the Qishon stream in northern Israel. The analyses shown that these bones represent the first Neanderthal remains outside caves in the Levant, and are among the very few of such finds worldwide. The remains were dated to the late Middle Paleolithic period, between 70,000 and 60,000 years ago by Dr. Naomi Porat from the Geological Survey of Israel.

The first individual is represented by a single upper molar tooth, and was studied by Dr. Stefano Benazzi and colleagues from the University of Ravena in Italy and the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig. This tooth is attributed to a Neanderthal using advanced imaging and statistical techniques. The other individual, studied by Dr. Ella Been in collaboration with researchers from Bar-Ilan and Tel-Aviv Universities, is represented by lower limbs of a young Neanderthal (15-22 years in age), who suffered from injuries that caused limping. This individual was found within a rich archaeological level containing flint tools, animal bones, and some unusual finds for this period, such as a marine shell, pigments and an antler of a deer.

The fate of the Neanderthals and the nature of their interactions with modern humans are among the focal questions in the research of the Middle Paleolithic period, which lasted ca. 200,000 years. The Near East is the only region known today where the two populations existed during the Middle Paleolithic. The finds from ‘Ein Qashish allow, for the first time in the history of research in this region, to tie material culture remains in an open-air site with the Neanderthals, known until now only from cave sites. The current study indicates that Neanderthals repeatedly visited the site of ‘Ein Qashish and that the settlement system of Neanderthals groups included both caves and open-air sites.

Fieldwork at the site of ‘Ein Qashish and following research on the finds were conducted by researchers and students from the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and the University of Haifa.

״A number of researchers have recently claimed that Neanderthals were adapted to life in rugged mountainous terrains whereas modern humans adapted better to flat and open landscapes. The finds from ‘Ein Qashish show that Neanderthals inhabited sites in diverse topographic and ecological contexts.

Another contentious topic concerns the causes for the disappearance of the Neanderthals. One of the prominent explanations offered was that it was difficult for Neanderthals groups in the Levant to cope with the environmental outcomes of a trend of increasing drying climate that was characteristic of the time period under study. The unique find from ‘Ein Qashish indicates that Neanderthal groups repeatedly returned to the open-air sites during this time. Our study suggests that Neanderthals were a resilient population that successfully existed in the north of Israel at the time that modern humans arrived from Africa some 60,000 years ago.”

According to this study, despite possible genetic flow between Neanderthal and early Homo sapiens populations and climatic fluctuations, the Neanderthals in the Levant were a resilient population that survived successfully in the region when modern humans reached it again some 60,000 years ago.
http://www.heritagedaily.com/2017/06/ne ... ape/115340
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby elfismiles » Wed Jul 26, 2017 3:18 pm

Ancient humans had sex with non humans
25 Jul, 2017 9:02am
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/science/news/ ... d=11894688
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Aug 09, 2017 10:25 pm

all this talk bout sex here made me think of neanderthals

:dancingcouple: :dancingcouple:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHnOBlwU3A

New gene study rewrites Neanderthal history
A NEW way to use DNA to peer into the history of humanity is rewriting what experts know about our long-extinct cousins.
The new study shows their population was far larger than we thought.
A NEW way to use DNA to peer into the history of humanity is rewriting what experts know about our long-extinct cousins, the Neanderthals, US researchers said Monday.
Previous research has suggested that near the end of their existence some 40,000 years ago, only about 1,000 Neanderthals were left on Earth.
But the new study shows their population was far larger — likely numbering in the tens of thousands — though they existed in isolated groups across Europe, said the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The genetic clues include Neanderthal DNA that contains mutations that usually occur in small populations with little genetic diversity.

Also, Neanderthal remains — found in various locations — are genetically different from each other.
“The idea is that there are these small, geographically isolated populations, like islands, that sometimes interact, but it’s a pain to move from island to island,” said co-author Ryan Bohlender, a postdoctoral fellow at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas.
“So, they tend to stay with their own populations.”
Using a new method to analyse DNA sequence data, researchers also found that Neanderthals split from another mysterious lineage, known as the Denisovans, about 744,000 years ago, much earlier than any other estimation of the split.
Using a new method to analyse DNA sequence data, researchers also found that Neanderthals split from another mysterious lineage, known as the Denisovans.
Using a new method to analyse DNA sequence data, researchers also found that Neanderthals split from another mysterious lineage, known as the Denisovans.Source:Supplied
After that, the global Neanderthal population grew to tens of thousands. “This hypothesis is against conventional wisdom, but it makes more sense than the conventional wisdom,” lead author Alan Rogers, professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Utah.
“There’s a rich Neanderthal fossil record. There are lots of Neanderthal sites,” he said.
“It’s hard to imagine that there would be so many of them if there were only 1,000 individuals in the whole world.” Very little is known about the Denisovans, sometimes described as the Eastern cousins of Neanderthals.
Only a few pieces of their remains — including some teeth and a pinkie bone — have ever been found.
Both Denisovans and Neanderthals mated with the ancestors of modern humans, who emerged from Africa about 60,000 years ago.
Researchers are not sure exactly why Neanderthals or Denisovans eventually died out, but it could have been due to harsh climate, or competition for scare resources with modern humans.
The study was based on comparing the genomes of four human populations: Modern Eurasians, modern Africans, Neanderthals and Denisovans.
This improved statistical method, called legofit, helped researchers estimate the percentage of Neanderthal genes flowing into modern Eurasian populations — which they confirmed was about two per cent.
It method revealed the date at which these ancestral populations diverged from each other, and their population sizes.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/scien ... 326b861435
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Aug 28, 2017 2:10 pm

New DNA From a Neanderthal Bone Holds Evidence of a Lost Tribe of Humans
In Ancient Archeology, From Around the WebAugust 25, 2017David Aragorn

New DNA From a Neanderthal Bone Holds Evidence of a Lost Tribe of Humans
We've been swapping DNA for a long time.

A femur discovered in a cave in southwestern Germany has provided researchers with firm evidence that a small population of humans left Africa and then vanished, long before the big migration that saw humans populate the globe.
Signs of this mysterious early migration remained in the DNA of the Neanderthal who left the leg bone behind, revealing not only a previous tryst between the two hominin populations, but a sign that Neanderthals were far more diverse than we thought.
A team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and the University of Tübingen in Germany used the DNA from the femur’s mitochondria to determine its relationship with other Neanderthals and modern humans.
Neanderthal and human history is a little complicated. So stick with us.
Neanderthals and huma’ns are regarded as close cousins, either under the same species of Homo sapiens or a closely related species Homo neanderthalis.
Mitochondria – our cells batteries – contain a set of genes separate from the DNA bunched up inside our nucleus. Since mitochondrial DNA mutates in a fairly predictable, conserved fashion, we can measure and map its mutations to get a good idea of when two populations last shared them.
Differences between our mitochondrial genes suggest we last shared a common ancestor a little over 400,000 years ago, though previous studies on nuclear DNA had estimated a split as far back as nearly 800,000 years ago.
Another group of human cousins dubbed the Denisovans also split off from a group of Neanderthals roughly 400,000 to 450,000 years ago before they went wandering the Earth.
The thing to note is Denisovans have nuclear DNA that matches Neanderthals’ DNA more than our own. Which makes sense, since Denisovans probably split off from a Neanderthal population.
But Neanderthals and modern humans have more similar mitochondria. Why the difference?
Neanderthal bones found in a Spanish cave have been dated to 430,000 years ago, suggesting their ancestors left Africa nearly half a million years ago and ventured across Europe as far as southern Siberia before dying out only a few tens of thousands of years ago.
Our own ancestors migrated out of Africa some time roughly 50,000 years ago, before establishing ourselves across the globe.
DNA taken from modern humans with non-African lineage reveals we have genes that had evolved in Neanderthals and Denisovans, suggesting there was a bit of an on-again/off-again relationship with our cousins over the millennia since we first parted ways.
Considering the populations had a chance to mingle in Europe over a span of a few thousand years, some sort of casual affair isn’t all that surprising.
But this new discovery is a bit of a shock.
The specimen, coded HST after the site of its discovery in Hohlenstein-Stadel cave, couldn’t be carbon-dated. But its mitochondrial DNA put it at about 124,000 years old.
“The bone, which shows evidence of being gnawed on by a large carnivore, provided mitochondrial genetic data that showed it belongs to the Neanderthal branch,” says lead researcher Cosimo Posth of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
Just to throw another twist into the story, this Neanderthal’s mitochondria didn’t come from the same group as those belonging to other previously analysed Neanderthal bones. Instead, it came from a lineage dating back at least 220,000 years.
Not only does this suggest modern humans might have been stepping tentatively into Europe and getting friendly with Neanderthals long before the wave of migration that led to today’s population, it shows Neanderthals were more diverse than we thought.
Taken altogether, this evidence helps flesh out the complex relationship between Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans.
Around 450,000 years ago, an ancestor of the Neanderthals and Denisovans split off and headed for Europe and Asia. Those who ventured further east eventually became the Denisovans; in the west, they were the Neanderthals.
Around 200,000 years later, a small group from our own ancestral line ventured out of Africa and bred with Neanderthals. This now lost tribe of humans was large enough to leave their mitochondria, but not so big to leave a significant mark on the Neanderthal’s nuclear DNA.
“This scenario reconciles the discrepancy in the nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA phylogenies of archaic hominins and the inconsistency of the modern human-Neanderthal population split time estimated from nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA,” says researcher Johannes Krause, also of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
This picture is just one possible explanation. It’s also possible that the bone comes from another distinct population that had itself migrated from Africa.
With the recent discovery of anatomically modern humans evolving 100,000 years earlier than previously estimated, it’s not out of the question that our ancestors did a lot of moving about.
Further discoveries could shine more of a light on the interactions between our human ancestors. Until then, the relationship status between Neanderthals and humans is ‘it’s complicated’.
http://earthmysterynews.com/2017/08/25/ ... of-humans/
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby Iamwhomiam » Mon Aug 28, 2017 3:33 pm

Yeah, ok. Glad we got that settled. But who had sex with these guys? In fact, who the hell are these guys?

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

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Mar 12, 2018 5:36 am

Neanderthals, the world’s first misunderstood artists

Carl ZimmerWednesday 7 March 2018 00:00 GMT
Cave paintings in Spain were made by Neanderthals, not modern humans, archaeologists report. The findings add to evidence that Neanderthals were capable of symbolic thought and perhaps language
Image

The ladder-shaped painting on the left in the La Pasiega cave in Spain is over 64,000 years old, and was made by Neanderthals P Saura
It’s long been an insult to be called a Neanderthal. But the more these elusive, vanished people have been studied, the more respect they’ve gained among scientists.

Last week, a team of researchers offered compelling evidence that Neanderthals bore one of the chief hallmarks of mental sophistication: they could paint cave art. That talent suggests that Neanderthals could think in symbols and may have achieved other milestones not preserved in the fossil record.

“When you have symbols, then you have language,” says Joao Zilhao, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona and co-author of the new study.

When Neanderthal fossils first came to light in the mid-1800s, researchers were struck by the low, thick brow-ridge on their skulls. Later discoveries showed Neanderthals to have brains as big as our own, but bodies that were shorter and stockier.

By the early 1900s, scientists were describing Neanderthals as gorilla-like beasts, an extinct branch of humanity that could not compete with slender, brilliant humans. Yet evidence from both fossils and DNA indicates that Neanderthals and living humans descend from a common ancestor who lived about 600,000 years ago. Our own branch probably lived mostly in Africa.

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A reconstruction of a Neanderthal male based on a skull discovered in Iraq (Sebastien Plailly/Elisabeth Daynes/Science Source)
For a few hundred thousand years after the split, the ancestors of living humans left behind such basic tools as stone axes for butchering carcasses and spear blades for hunting. But about 70,000 years ago, humans in Africa began showing signs of more abstract thinking. They coloured and pierced seashells, for example, possibly to wear as jewellery.

Modern humans began expanding from Africa, arriving in Europe roughly 45,000 years ago. By then, they had become capable of even more impressive symbolic creations, including ivory carvings and extravagant paintings on cave walls.

Neanderthals disappeared abruptly afterward, about 40,000 years ago, leaving behind a fossil record of their own from Spain to Siberia. Stockier than their African cousins, they appear to have evolved physical adaptations to harsh climates. They made stone tools of their own, which they used to hunt for game, including rhinos and other big mammals.

At first, researchers found no clear evidence of symbolic thought in Neanderthals. But in recent years, that picture has begun to change.

Neanderthals could use feathers and bird claws as ornaments, archaeologists found. But some scientists were sceptical about what these findings meant. Neanderthals might have lived near modern humans, after all, and spotted them making things. Neanderthals were smart enough to copy the ornaments, the thinking went – but not enough to invent them.

This debate was fuelled in part by the difficulty in pinning down a date for human fossils and artefacts.

Image
Pierced and coloured shells – previously thought to have been made by humans, but the new study suggests Neanderthals may have been responsible (J Zilhao)
To determine the age of cave paintings, for example, researchers have traditionally relied on radiocarbon dating. But that method only works if the paint contains carbon-bearing ingredients, such as charcoal. Red ochre, by contrast, can’t be dated this way.

Making matters worse, radiocarbon dating becomes increasingly unreliable beyond about 40,000 years.

Zilhao joined with archaeologists Alistair GW Pike of the University of Southampton and Dirk L Hoffmann, now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, to see if the prehistory of European art could be brought into sharper focus.

Instead of studying radiocarbon, they would use a different clock to tell time.

As water seeps into caves, it may deposit milky crusts of minerals on the walls, known as flowstones. Flowstones contain tiny amounts of uranium, which slowly breaks down into thorium. The older a flowstone gets, the more thorium builds up inside it.

A flowstone covering a piece of cave art might give Zilhao and his colleagues a minimum age for its creation. The problem was that scientists usually needed big chunks to find enough uranium and thorium to measure. The flowstones on cave art were typically very small.

But Hoffman had been working on ways to drastically increase the sensitivity of the technology so that he could work with much smaller samples.

The researchers returned to caves in Spain where ancient paintings had been discovered over the past century. The artists had drawn abstract images on the cave walls, including long lines, patterns of dots and the outline of a human hand.

4657547.jpg
Archaeologists Dirk Hoffmann (left) and Alistair Pike sample calcite crust atop a red, ladder-like painting in the La Pasiega cave (J Zilhao)
The team found flowstones covering parts of the artworks and scraped away samples for dating. In three caves, it turned out, some of the art was over 64,000 years old – about 20,000 years earlier than the first evidence of modern humans in Europe.

“They must have been made by Neanderthals,” says Pike.

Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands who was not involved in the new study, says the evidence was conclusive. “This constitutes a major breakthrough in the field of human evolution studies,” he says. “Neanderthal authorship of some cave art is a fact.”

Dating flowstones is a big advance on previous techniques for determining the age of cave art, but there is one major limitation: it can only assign a minimum age to cave paintings. Flowstones may have begun forming the day after a painting was finished – or 10,000 years afterward.

But a second study, which Zilhao and his colleagues published last week in the journal Science Advances, hints that Neanderthals might well have been painting long before 64,000 years ago.

The scientists travelled to a cave on the coast of Spain where Zilhao had earlier discovered shells that had been drilled with holes and painted with ochre.

In 2010, he and his colleagues had used radiocarbon dating to estimate the age of other shells in the same layer of rock at 45,000 to 50,000 years old. That result did not tell the team who made the ornaments. Neanderthals might be responsible, but it was also possible that the earliest modern humans in Europe made them.

And the uncertainties of radiocarbon dating also had left open the possibility that the shells were, in fact, far older.

Zilhao returned to the cave in order to try uranium dating. He and his colleagues discovered a layer of flowstone sitting atop the rock where they had found the shell jewellery. That flowstone turned out to be about 115,000 years old. The coloured, pierced shells themselves are probably not much older than that. Up until about 118,000 years ago, the cave was flooded, thanks to sea levels.

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Cueva de los Aviones, in eastern Spain – once home to Neanderthals (J Zilhao)
That finding provides strong evidence that the shells were made by Neanderthals.

The two new studies don’t just indicate that Neanderthals could make cave art and jewellery. They also establish that Neanderthals were making these things long before modern humans – a blow to the idea that they simply copied their cousins.

“These results imply that Neanderthals were not apart from these developments,” says Zilhao. “For all practical purposes, they were modern humans, too.”

The new studies raise another intriguing possibility, says Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum: that the capacity for symbolic thought was already present 600,000 years ago in the ancestors of both Neanderthals and modern humans.

He agreed with Zilhao that the new study supports the idea that Neanderthals used language. In addition to the evidence of symbolic thought, researchers have also found that the inner ears of Neanderthals were tuned to the frequencies of speech, much like our own.

“We don’t know how they spoke or what they said,” says Finlayson. “But they had the ability of speech.”

The cave paintings that Pike and his colleagues have dated are generally abstract. There’s no evidence so far that Neanderthals painted images of lions and other animals, as modern humans did thousands of years later.

Image
Ladder-like painting in the La Pasiega cave. Animals, visible in a rendering made by an archaeologist in 1913, (right), are thought to have been added later by modern humans (CD Standish, AWG Pike and DL Hoffmann)
But Pike doesn’t think a lack of animal imagery marks a mental deficiency in Neanderthals. It could simply reflect a cultural preference.

“It could just be that they had a different belief system and didn’t think animals were important to depict in deep caves,” he says. “If you have to prepare your pigment and get to a place in the pitch dark to paint a red line, that’s as meaningful as someone painting a bison.”

In the past, many researchers have claimed that mental differences between modern humans and Neanderthals were the reason we are alive today and Neanderthal populations have vanished. Our own ancestors, it’s been argued, were able to come up with creative solutions for survival.

The accumulating evidence puts Neanderthals on a more equal footing.

Their culture developed in parallel with that of modern humans in Africa. And their disappearance is not evidence of inferiority, only of the inexorable mechanics of evolution.

“Neanderthals have disappeared,” says Zilhao. “So have Fuegian Indians. So have Greenland Vikings. Population extinction has been a part of human history forever.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 30621.html


Neanderthals Were Actually Prehistoric Picassos

Image
This panel in the Maltravieso Cave in Spain shows some hand stencils. Scientists have dated it to at least 64,000 years ago and determined it must have been made by a Neanderthal. H. Collado/University of Southampton

Were Neanderthals alive, they'd have a major inferiority complex. Since the first discovery of Neanderthal fossils, they've been compared to Homo sapiens, and found lacking. Seen by many as dumb and incapable of language, it seemed no wonder that the species disappeared at some point.

However, the Neanderthal reputation is enjoying some long-awaited street cred, thanks to researchers at the University of Southampton and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. The team used uranium-thorium dating techniques (which are more precise than the more common radiocarbon dating method) to confirm that three cave paintings in various parts of Spain are more than 64,000 years old.

The scientists found tiny carbonate deposits that contained traces of the elements uranium and thorium on the cave paintings. They were able to use those traces to determine when the deposits were formed and estimate an age for the artwork.

Why is this so significant? Homo sapiens (the species humans are descended from), didn't hit Europe until some 20,000 years later, making Neanderthals the default pre-Picassos. Plus, their use of symbols in the paintings turns the prevailing intellectual view of the species right on its ear. "When you have symbols, then you have language," study co-author João Zilhão, told The New York Times.

The cave art in question are mostly paintings red and black in color. The depictions are of geometric shapes, handprints, hand stencils, a number of animals and linear signs. "Thus, [Neanderthals] possessed a much richer symbolic behavior than previously assumed," write the authors in the study, published in the Feb. 23, 2018 issue of the journal Science.

This discovery could cause many anthropologists to re-think previous assumptions about other known cave art and how the species grew and changed over time.

"Soon after the discovery of the first of their fossils in the 19th century, Neanderthals were portrayed as brutish and uncultured, incapable of art and symbolic behaviour, and some of these views persist today," says study co-director Alistair Pike in a press release. "The issue of just how human-like Neanderthals behaved is a hotly debated issue. Our findings will make a significant contribution to that debate
https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/ ... cassos.htm
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Re: The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Apr 08, 2018 1:14 pm

David Reich: ‘Neanderthals were perhaps capable of many modern human behaviours’

Robin McKieSat 7 Apr 2018 13.00 EDT
In recent years, genome sequencing has changed everything we thought about our origins and how we relate to early human species

david reich poses for a photo in front of a whiteboard
David Reich: ‘We don’t have the comfort of standing on the shoulders of others. We are the first.’ Photograph: Kayana Szymczak/NYT/eyevine
For David Reich, research can be a harrowing experience. The 44-year-old Harvard University geneticist says he now goes to bed terrified he will wake up to find his team’s recent, stunning discoveries about human ancestry have been proved wrong. “We are now making so many startling insights I sometimes fear it must all be incorrect,” he says.

To be fair to Reich, no one has yet found any hint his results are invalid. “That still doesn’t stop me worrying,” he insists.

Reich’s work as a leader of prehistoric population studies includes the discovery that all people of non-African descent carry small amounts of Neanderthal DNA, showing that Homo sapiens – at one stage – must have interbred with this long-dead species of ancient humans. Reich was also involved in uncovering the existence of Denisovans, a previously unknown species of ancient humans, using DNA found in fossil scraps in a Siberian cave.

In addition, he has discovered that 5,000 years ago northern Europe was overrun by invaders from central Asia, a migration of profound importance – for those newcomers became the first people of the British Isles.

These remarkable recreations of our past are outlined in Reich’s book Who We Are and How We Got Here, in which he chronicles the spectacular rise of ancient DNA studies in the last few years. Thanks to this remarkable new science, we now know that about 70,000 years ago, our planet was remarkably rich in terms of its human variety.

It was populated by modern humans, Neanderthals – and the Denisovans who, Reich has recently discovered, must have existed as at least two separate varieties: Siberian Denisovans and the more recently discovered Australo-Denisovans from south-east Asia. In addition, we also know that the Hobbit folk – Homo floresiensis, a race of tiny humans whose remains were discovered in 2003 – were then thriving in Indonesia. In those not too distant days, there were many ways to be a human, it transpires.

A recreation of the face of a Neanderthal.
A recreation of the face of a Neanderthal. Photograph: Jose A Astor/Alamy Stock Photo
The ingrained notion – that there has only ever been one species of human being, Homo sapiens – is a latterday fiction born of our own self-important view of ourselves. Think instead of the bar scene from Star Wars with all those various people playing and drinking, says the Israeli palaeontologist Yoel Rak. That gives a far better flavour of our evolutionary past.

In making constant new discoveries about humanity, Reich and his Harvard team are now plunging into uncharted academic waters. “We are going out on a limb on so many different studies,” he says. “It is very lonely and somewhat terrifying. We don’t have the comfort of standing on the shoulders of others. We are the first. That’s why I worry.”

Reich’s influence in this field has been immense and the output of his department monumental. This year alone he has been involved in producing an analysis that reveals the existence of a previously unknown group of ancient Native Americans from fossil remains uncovered in Alaska; a study that shows the ancient British people who built Stonehenge and other great neolithic monuments were almost completely replaced by invaders from central Asia 5,000 years ago; and a paper that indicates there were at least two waves of settlers, from Taiwan and then Papua New Guinea, which were responsible – 3,000 years ago – for the settling of one of the last pockets of the planet to be reached by humans, Vanuatu.

Ancient DNA studies are overturning our oversimplified vision of our past and are the outcome of a late 20th-century revolution in molecular biology that gave scientists the power to study DNA, the material from which our genes are made, with startling precision. For the first time, the exact structure and makeup of a gene could be determined and the detailed origins of many inherited illnesses and cancers outlined, setting in motion the slow, ongoing task of developing new treatments.

By contrast, the study of ancient DNA, which uses the same basic technology, began late but has since flowered far more dramatically. “It is in the area of shedding light on human migrations – rather than in explaining human biology – that the genome revolution has been a runaway success,” says Reich.

The field’s hesitant start is understandable. In samples from living animals, DNA exists in long, healthy, easily analysed strands. However, DNA starts to decay the moment an organism dies and those strands quickly fragment. And the longer the passage of time, the shorter the fragments become.

The genome revolution should make us realise we are all entitled equally to our human heritage
This disintegration poses problems. If, for example, you want to study Neanderthals, who dominated Europe for around 400,000 years and who were close in evolutionary terms to Homo sapiens, DNA from their fossils is going to be in minuscule pieces. The last member of this doomed species died more than 40,000 years ago, after all. Genetic material taken from Neanderthal fossils is also likely to be contaminated with large amounts of DNA from bacteria and vegetation – and sometimes from researchers.

Trying to create a genome from these sullied scraps has been likened, by writer Elizabeth Kolbert, to reassembling “a Manhattan telephone book from pages that have been put through a shredder, mixed with yesterday’s trash and left to rot in a landfill”.

Nevertheless, scientists have persevered and in 2007, geneticist Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, decided to assemble a team of experts to sequence a Neanderthal genome that would be billions of DNA units in length. Reich, an innovator in the field of studying population mixtures, was asked to join and has since played a key role in the fledgling field’s remarkable development.

Clean rooms were built, advanced gene sequencers purchased and DNA extracted from Neanderthal bones that had been found in Vindija cave in Croatia. A Neanderthal genome was slowly spliced together from pieces of DNA only a few dozen units in length. It was a brilliant achievement though Reich makes clear progress was halting. “The Neanderthal sequences we were working with had a mistake approximately every 200 DNA letters,” he reveals in his book.

These errors were not due to differences between humans and Neanderthals, it should be pointed out, but to errors made in analysing DNA. It was Reich’s task to get round these problems and help create a meaningful genome of a Neanderthal. From that, scientists could assess just how closely we were related to these ancient people. His tests succeeded and subsequently showed, to everyone’s surprise, that many modern humans carry small amounts of Neanderthal DNA in their genomes. “Non-African genomes today are around 1.5 to 2.1% Neanderthal in origin,” he says.

So yes, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had a common ancestor, about 500,000 years ago, before the former evolved as a separate species – in Africa – and the latter as a different species in Europe. Then around 70,000 years ago, when modern humans emerged from Africa, we encountered the Neanderthals, most probably in the Middle East. We briefly mixed and interbred with them before we continued our slow diaspora across the planet.

In doing so, those early planetary settlers carried Neanderthal DNA with them as they spread out over the world’s four quarters. Hence its presence in all those of non-African origin. By contrast, Neanderthal DNA is absent in people of African origins because they remained in our species’s homeland.

Reich has since established that such interbreeding may have occurred on more than one occasion. More importantly, his studies show that “Neanderthals must have been more like us than we had imagined, perhaps capable of many behaviours that we typically associate with modern humans”. They would, most likely, have had language, culture and sophisticated behaviours. Hence the mutual attraction.

That itself is intriguing. However, there is another key implication of Reich’s work. Previously, it had been commonplace to view human populations arising from ancestral groupings like the trunk of a great tree. “Present populations budded from past ones, which branched from a common root in Africa,” he states. “And it implies that if a population separates then it does not remix, as fusions of branches cannot occur.”

But the initial separation of the two lines of ancient humans who gave rise to Neanderthals and to Homo sapiens – and then their subsequent intermingling – shows that remixing does occur. Indeed, Reich believes it was commonplace and that the standard tree model of populations is basically wrong. Throughout our prehistory, populations have split, reformed, moved on, remixed and interbred and then moved on again. Alliances have shifted and empires have fallen in a perpetual, sliding global Game of Thrones.

An illustration is provided by the puzzling fact that Europeans and Native Americans share surprising genetic similarities. The explanation was provided by Reich who has discovered that a now nonexistent group of people, the Ancient North Eurasians, thrived around 15,000 years ago and then split into two groups. One migrated across Siberia and gave rise to the people who crossed the Bering land bridge between Asia and America and later gave rise to Native Americans. The other group headed west and contributed to Europeans. Hence the link between Europeans and Native Americans.

No physical specimen of the Ancient North Eurasian people had ever been discovered when Reich announced their existence. Instead, he based his analysis on the ghostly impact of their DNA on present-day people. However, the fossil remains of a boy, recently found near the Siberian village of Mal’ta, have since been found to have DNA that matches the genomes of Ancient North Eurasians, giving firmer physical proof of their existence.

“Prior to the genome revolution, I – like most others – had assumed that the big genetic clusters of populations we see today reflect deep splits of the past. But in fact the big clusters today are themselves the result of mixtures of very different populations that existed earlier. There was never a single trunk population in the human past. It has been mixtures all the way down.”

Instead of a tree, a better metaphor would be a trellis, branching and remixing far back into the past, says Reich, whose work indicates that the idea of race is a very fluid, ephemeral concept. However, he is adamant that it is a very real one and takes issue with those geneticists who argue that there are no substantial differences in traits between populations.

“This is a strategy that we scientists can no longer afford and that in fact is positively harmful,” he argues. Plenty of traits show differences between populations: skin colour, susceptibility to disease, the ability to breath at high altitudes and the ability to digest starch. More to the point, uncovering these differences is only just beginning. Many more will be discovered over the decades, Reich believes. Crucially, we need to be able to debate the implications of their presence at varying levels in different populations. That is not happening at present and that has dangerous implications.

“If as scientists we wilfully abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing human differences, we will leave a vacuum that will be filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly,” says Reich.

The genome revolution provides us with a shared history, he adds. “If we pay proper attention, it should give us an alternative to the evils of racism and nationalism and make us realise that we are all entitled equally to our human heritage.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... ans-genome


Neanderthals cared for each other and survived into old age – new research

James Ohman April 5, 2018 6.09am EDT
When we think of Neanderthals, we often imagine these distant ancestors of ours to be rather brutish, dying at a young age and ultimately becoming extinct. But new findings show that at least some of these ancient Neanderthals survived into old age – despite suffering from sickness or diseases.

Neanderthals were hunter-gatherers, living in harsh environments, mostly colder than today. And of course they had to face different dangers to modern humans – not only during the hunt, but also because they shared ecosystems with large carnivores such as lions, leopards and hyenas.

But despite this harsh life of the hunter gatherer, our research indicates that some Neanderthals lived to be fairly old and even had some of the signs of age related illnesses – such as degenerative lesions in the spine, consistent with osteoarthritis. Our research also found that an adult male Neanderthal survived bone fractures. And when he died, he was buried by members of his group.

Introducing the Neanderthals

The first fossil remain of a Neanderthal was found in 1829 in Belgium. But it was not until 1856 that the species was named after the discovery of a partial skeleton in Germany. The site (called Feldhofer) was located in the Neander valley. In old German “valley” is written “thal” and hence the scientific name Homo neanderthalensis, which means “the humans from the Neander valley”, was born.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the fossils of several Neanderthals were found in France – comprising the most complete skeletons found to that date. The region, which is on the verges of the rivers Dordogne and Vezère, is an archaeological hotspot with a number of famous sites, such as the Cro-Magnon rockshelter, Lascaux, and La Chapelle-aux-Saints.


Photo of the discovery of La Ferrassie 1 in 1909. Collections M.N.P. Les Eyzies, Author provided
These sites have been vital in helping archaeologists understand human evolution in Europe during the Upper Pleistocene. This is 126,000 years ago, to the end of the last glacial period which was approximately 12,000 years ago. One of these sites, called La Ferrassie, which is in Dordogne, France, has yielded the complete skeletons of two adult and the incomplete skeletons of five juvenile Neanderthals – as well as a few isolated dental remains.

Most of these skeletons were found at the beginning of the 20th century, but during previous excavations at the sites (between the 1960s to 1970s) archeologists discovered a child skeleton, which was called La Ferrassie 8. And we were able to further complete this skeleton when we reassessed the bone remains more recently.

New data from an ancient grave

La Ferrassie 1 (LF1) was the first skeleton to be found in the La Ferrassie rock shelter in 1909 and is still one of the most complete Neanderthal skeletons ever to be found. LF1 is a male Neanderthal skeleton, found in Dordogne and estimated to be 70,000-50,000 years old. He died when he was between 40 and 55 years old – a relatively old age in this species. He was a fairly tall Neanderthal (172cm or five feet eight inches) and weighed around 85kg.

As part of our research, we used new non-invasive technologies to complete our direct observations of the skeleton of LF1. We observed several anomalies in the spine and in the shape of the clavicle. A CT-scan revealed this was probably due to a fracture of the left clavicle, which happened before this individual became an adult.


Comparison between the left clavicle (up), which is pathological with the mirror image of the right clavicle (bottom). Asier Gómez-Olivencia, Author provided
This was not the only fracture that this individual suffered. Previous studies have also shown that this Neanderthal also broke part of his femur. We also found degenerative lesions on his spine, consistent with osteoarthritis. And previous research has also shown that he suffered from a lung disease – which could have been the cause of death.

Growing old gracefully

What this all shows is that many Neanderthals may have lived to be older than previously estimated – much like humans of today. And it’s also believed that much like us, some Neanderthal groups actually buried their dead.

French sites such as La Chapelle-aux-Saints and La Ferrassie have provided evidence to support this. In La Ferrassie, at least five of the skeletons show an East-West orientation and the two adults show the same orientation but face opposite directions.

Denis Peyrony, the director of the excavation when La Ferrassie 1 was found, indicated that this individual was lying in a “funeral pit”, a purposefully dug hole where the corpse was laid. And our observations looking at the bone surface and the way the bones are broken are consistent with the corpse being buried shortly after death. The corpse also didn’t suffer any damage from carnivores – which would have been the case if the corpse had been left behind by the group.

Much like humans of today, then, it seems the Neanderthals, if injured, received help from other members of the group, which helped them to survive – with some of them reaching advanced ages. So maybe it’s time we changed our stereotype of the brutish, thuggish Neanderthals, and instead start viewing them with the respect and awe they really deserve.
https://theconversation.com/neanderthal ... arch-93110


Oldest Neanderthal wooden tools found in Spain

Image
Archaeological excavations at Aranbaltza site in the Basque Country coast (Northern Spain), have revealed several episodes of Neanderthal occupations with preserved wooden remains. The fieldwork is leaded by Joseba Rios-Garaizar, archaeologist from the Spanish Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH). In 2015, the excavation revealed two very well preserved wooden tools; one of them is a 15 cm long digging stick.

The detailed analysis of this tool and the Luminescence dating of the sediment that bares the wooden remains indicate that the objects were deposited around 90,000 years and thus, they were made by Neanderthals.

The Micro-CT analysis and a close examination of the surface developed at CENIEH laboratories have shown that a yew trunk was cut longitudinally into two halves. One of this halves was scraped with a stone-tool, and treated with fire to harden it and to facilitate the scraping to obtain a pointed morphology. Use-wear analysis revealed that it was used for digging in search of food, flint, or simply to make holes in the ground.

The preservation of wooden tools associated to Neanderthals is very rare because wood degrades very quickly. Only in very specific environments, like the waterlogged sediments from Aranbaltza, it has been possible to find evidence of wooden technology. As it was suggested by indirect evidence, this type of technology was relevant in Neanderthal daily life.

In the Iberian Peninsula wooden tools associated to Neanderthals have been found only in the travertine from Abric Romaní (Catalonia), and in the rest of Europe only four sites (Clacton on Sea, Schöningen, Lehringen and Poggeti Vechi) have provided wooden tools associated to Neanderthals or pre-Neanderthals. Therefore, findings like the one from Aranbaltza are crucial to investigate the Neanderthal technology and use of wood.

The archaeological project at Aranbaltza started in 2013 to investigate the last Neanderthals from Western Europe, who were responsible of the Chatelperronian culture. The ongoing excavations have revealed different Neanderthal occupation events spanning from 100,000 to 44,000 years. This makes of Aranbaltza an exceptional site to investigate Neanderthal evolution and behavioral variability.

This project is coordinated by the CENIEH and INRAP and funded by Heritage Center of the Bizkaia Regional Government (2013-2017) and Basque Government (2014-2015). Researchers from the following institutions have participated in this publication: CENIEH, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, Universidad de Burgos, INRAP, Universidad del País Vasco and Universidad de Cantabria.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 090050.htm
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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