Posted on 05/11/2011 7:41:02 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The first humans to reach Europe may have found it a ghost world. Carbon-dated Neanderthal remains from the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains suggest that the archaic species had died out before modern humans arrived.
The remains are almost 10,000 years older than expected. They come from just one cave in western Russia, called Mezmaiskaya, but bones at other Neanderthal sites farther west could also turn out to be more ancient than previously thought, thanks to a precise carbon-dating technique, says Thomas Higham, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK, and a co-author of a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
The implication, says Higham's team, is that Neanderthals and humans might never have met in Europe. However, the Neanderthal genome, decoded last year2, hints that the ancestors of all humans, except those from Africa, interbred with Neanderthals somewhere. Perhaps humans departing Africa encountered resident Neanderthals in the Middle East.
"DNA results show that there was admixture probably at some stage in our human ancestry, but it more than likely happened quite a long time before humans arrived in Europe," says Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist at University College Cork in Ireland, who is lead author of the latest study. "I don't believe there were regions where Neanderthals were living next to modern humans. I just don't find it very feasible," he adds.
Time horizon
Carbon dating of stone tools characteristic to humans and Neanderthals, as well as their physical remains, has previously given the impression that the first humans to reach Europe, between about 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, shared the continent with Neanderthals long established there.
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
A blow to evolution?
Most interesting.
The problem here would be why did the Neanderthals die out, without competition or aggression, from Homo Sapiens?
‘A blow to evolution?’
No.
The key sentence "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence,"
Interesting, but I have my doubts that they didn’t co-exist.
Driven by concerns over rapidly dwindling ice sheets, Neanderthals set out to decrease Neanderthalgenic Global Warming by no longer using fire. The rest is history.
RE: A blow to evolution?
Not really a blow to evolution, just another change of historical guesses to “fit” the current evidence. Originally the theory was Homo sapiens lived side by side with Neanderthals and interbred with them and later, maybe even displaced or killed them.
Now this latest find suggests that humans didn’t kill the Neanderthals; they died before we got there.
I guess the pertinent question is -— “Do we honestly think we understand the Human-Neanderthal relationship better than we did twenty-five years ago? If so, in what ways?”
‘The liberals will not like the idea that humans and Neanderthals did not have sex.’
The article clearly states that ALL humans not residing in Africa are partially descended from Neanderthals. That means both me and you and most Freepers.
So, if humans came “up out of Africa”, and the Neanderthals were already in Europe, then where the hell did the Neanderthals come from?
By George, you’ve got it!
‘where the hell did the Neanderthals come from?’
The current theory seems to be that they descended from Heidelberg Man, which arose in Africa more than half a million years before Homo Sapiens, and who had spread out of Africa at, very roughly, 500 thousand B.C.
I guess it was inevitable that a guy named Heidelberg would end up in Europe.
So they were a distinctly separate group and migration way previous to “humans”. Wow, we are getting down to counting pretty fine threads. I was always led to believe that they wre just an earlier form of modern man~~ Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon and modern man....
Good one! Clever.
Crap about humans being related to any hominids other than via similar design remains crap no matter how often it is repeated. Neanderthal DNA was halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee; we could no more interbreed with them than we could with horses, and we are not descended from them, and all other hominids were FURTHER removed from us THAN the Neanderthal.
Too-far-removed-to-be-descended-from-via-evolution is a transitive relationship. There is nothing on this planet we could be descended from via any process resembling evolution.
This is a joke, right?
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