Posted on 03/27/2008 2:27:09 PM PDT by blam
Neanderthals wore make-up and liked to chat
09:24 27 March 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Dan Jones
Could Neanderthals speak? The answer may depend on whether they used make-up.
Francesco d'Errico, an archaeologist from the University of Bordeaux, France, has found crafted lumps of pigment – essentially crayons – left behind by Neanderthals across Europe.
He says that Neanderthals, who most likely had pale skin, used these dark pigments to mark their own as well as animal skins. And, since body art is a form of communication, this implies that the Neanderthals could speak, d'Errico says.
Working with Marie Soressi of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, d'Errico has recovered hundreds of blocks of black manganese pigment from two neighbouring sites at Pech de l'Azé in France, which were occupied by Neanderthals. These add to evidence of pigment among Neanderthal from some 39 other sites.
The pigments were not just smeared onto the body like camouflage, d'Errico says, but fashioned into drawing tools.
"The flat, elongated surfaces on the archaeological specimens are consistent, as confirmed experimentally, with producing clearly visible straight black lines, perhaps arranged to produce abstract designs," says d'Errico, who presented his work on 15 March at the Seventh Evolution of Language Conference in Barcelona, Spain.
Essential words
Body painting, argues d'Errico, is a "material proxy" for symbolic communication. What's more, he says, the techniques for making the symbols, and the meaning they carry, would have to be transmitted through language.
And body painting isn't the only proxy associated with Neanderthal remains. Neanderthals adorned their bodies with ornamentation, such as necklaces made from shell beads.
The sorts of beads used by modern humans, and the ornaments they fashioned from them, vary geographically.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
GGG Ping.
Did they text message too?
This should be an interesting thread..
Sometimes I post on forums too. What of it?
well , . . . just when I got comfortable with recent history , and ancient history . . ....
I get another curveball
“He says that Neanderthals, who most likely had pale skin, used these dark pigments to mark their own as well as animal skins.”
I bet it sucked to be a Neaderthal if they wanted to join PETA.
Jeez...now why did you have to post that photo?!
Ug, ooh ooh, wa wa wa...ungawa.
Makes for interesting conversation, dont’cha think?
Man, how the hades do they know that?
Ancient DNA suggests that at least some Neanderthals had red hair and pale skin. Neanderthals' pigmentation may even have been as varied as that of modern humans, and that at least 1 percent of Neanderthals were likely redheads. (Credit: "Illustration by Knut Finstermeier; Neanderthal reconstruction by the Reiss-Engelhorn-Museum Mannheim")
ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2007) — Ancient DNA retrieved from the bones of two Neanderthals suggests that at least some of them had red hair and pale skin, scientists report in the journal Science. The international team says that Neanderthals' pigmentation may even have been as varied as that of modern humans, and that at least 1 percent of Neanderthals were likely redheads.
The scientists -- led by Holger Römpler of Harvard University and the University of Leipzig, Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona, and Michael Hofreiter of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig -- extracted, amplified, and sequenced a pigmentation gene called MC1R from the bones of a 43,000-year-old Neanderthal from El Sidrón, Spain, and a 50,000-year-old individual from Monti Lessini, Italy.
"Together with other genes, this MC1R gene dictates hair and skin color in humans and other mammals," says Römpler, a postdoctoral researcher working with Hopi E. Hoekstra in Harvard's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. "The two Neanderthal individuals we studied showed a point mutation not seen in modern humans. When we induced such a mutation in human cells, we found that it impaired MC1R activity, a condition that leads to red hair and pale skin in modern humans."
To ensure that the MC1R point mutation was not due to contamination from modern humans, the scientists checked some 3,700 people, including those previously sequenced for the gene as well as everyone involved in the excavation and genetic analysis of the two Neanderthals. None showed the mutation, suggesting that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens followed different evolutionary paths to the same redheaded appearance.
With Neanderthals' surviving bones providing few clues, scientists have long sought to flesh out the appearance of this hominid species found across Eurasia some 28,000 to 400,000 years ago. While anthropologists had predicted that Neanderthals might have had pale skin or red hair, the new work by Römpler and colleagues offers the first strong evidence to support this hunch.
Found in cell membranes, MC1R is a receptor that acts as a switch between production of the red-and-yellow pigment pheomelanin and the black-and-brown pigment eumelanin. Modern humans with mutations that cause complete or partial loss of MC1R function tend to be pale and red-haired, although many other pigmentation genes can also result in this phenotype.
In 2006, a team led by Römpler found a mutation in woolly mammoths that may lead to some blond mammoths; together with her colleagues, Hoekstra, the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard and curator in mammalogy in Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, has shown that this same mutation causes light coloration in mice. Römpler and Hoekstra are now collaborating to identify genetic changes responsible for pigment variation in other extant and extinct species.
"It has only recently become possible to decipher the genomes of species which became extinct thousands of years ago," Römpler says. "The methods used in these Neanderthal and mammoth studies could provide new insights into the coloration of other extinct hominids, animals, and plants."
Reference: Carles Lalueza-Fox, Holger Römpler, Michael Hofreiter et al., A melanocortin 1 receptor allele suggests varying pigmentation among Neanderthals. Science, October 25, 2007
Römpler, Lalueza-Fox, and Hofreiter's co-authors are David Caramelli and Elena Pilli of the University of Firenze; Claudia Stäubert and Torsten Schöneberg of the University of Leipzig; Giulio Catalano of the University of Firenze and Universitat Pompeu Fabra; David Hughes, Nadin Rohland, and Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Laura Longo of the University of Siena; Silvana Condemi of CNRS; Marco de la Rasilla and Javier Fortea of the University of Oveido; Antonio Rosas of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid; and Jaume Bertranpetit of Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
The work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science; the Generalitat de Catalunya; the Max Planck Society; the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung; the IZKF Leipzig; the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes; and the Autonomous Government of Asturias.
Adapted from materials provided by Harvard University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
"Perhaps a little rouge will de-emphasize his brow ridges" said Pierre de Prognathic, makeup man to the Neandertals.
I swear there was a freeper named Barney Rumble...anyone else remember that name?
So ... makeup and chatting ... I think it means neanderthals died out because they were all homosexuals....
Anyone here read Loren Eisley? He was a poet/ anthropologist who wrote convincingly about Neanderthals living among us in our genetic pool.
These so-called scientists who claim that Neanderthal was replaced by humans need to grow up and give up their racism. Some of my best friends are Neanderthals.
Metro-thals.
Pharmboy...thanks for the pic...to me it looks like the mugshot of the Mayor of Detroit...Kwame what’s his name...
"I'll have the roast duck with the mango salsa."
Make-up. Hundreds of “crayons”. Must have been an early make-up counter in the women’s department.
Or, I could google “black manganese cave paintings” and find that this was commonly used in cave art/images.
Sheesh. No evidence presented in this article, just making stuff up. You sure Hillary didn’t write this?
Wow beat me by 6 seconds and a clever quote
Nah. Nancy Pelosi is the perfect example.
Duh! There were like, tons of way cool Neandertal Valley girls, hitting the cave malls to the max lookin’ for gnarly dudes, right?
Why would they be pale? Wouldn’t they be tanned because they were outside allot?
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Neandertals are starting to sound like Picts.
“Tina’s here. We’re getting back together!”
Like my wife.
lol
Actually the word slave is derived from Slav, because when the word was coined (in the Byzantine Empire, I think) most slaves were Slavs.
Whaddayknow. Next they'll be telling us the thals liked show tunes.
Article is full of “most likely” “implies” “perhaps”
This guy is full of himself and doesn’t know squat for sure. He should be sayin’, “I might very well be wrong, but I guess this, and I guess that. I have no proof, but I’m impressed by my guessing. And you should be too!”
Are they saying that natural pale skinned redheads like me are mutants? Well!!
Seriously, is it really a gene mutation that causes pale skin and red hair? It happens in my family about every other generation. I was the lucky one this generation.
Spelling, Gesklaven(?), German, reflects the Eastward expansion. I do think that the Byzantines gave us bugger through a long line of references that I don’t remember.
(Pharmboy muttering to himself) “Where does he come up with this stuff??”
Cool Uni-brow, Breshy-boy!
Man is an intelligent being.
If his primary needs are met...he goes no further.
It's kinda like doing the sign language things with babies. My son's wife did this with their first kid...And the kid is screwed up royally. He is unsocial and lacks initiative....almost altistic and responds only to his mother and father...
Probably not but I have red hair, my grandmother had red hair, and my great-great grandmother had red hair. For some reason it only shows up every other generation. It seems kind of odd. That's as far back as I know of but I remember my grandmother saying that it has occurred every other generation way back through the family tree.
:^)
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