2013 Q2 FReepathon. Target: $85,000 Receipts & Pledges to-date: $72,000
84%  
Woo hoo!! Less than $13k to go!! We can do this!! Thank you all very much!! FReepers ROCK!!

Keyword: neanderthals

Brevity: Headers | « Text »
  • Otzi’s Neandertal ancestry

    05/18/2013 3:27:48 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 14 replies
    Science News ^ | May 18, 2013; Vol.183 #10; Web edition: April 15, 2013 | Bruce Bower
    A 5,300-year-old man found sticking out of an Alpine glacier in 1991 possessed more genes in common with Neandertals than Europeans today do. The man’s Neandertal heritage is a preliminary sign that Stone Age interbreeding occurred more frequently than many scientists assume. Two researchers determined that the previously analyzed genome of Ötzi the Tyrolean Iceman (SN: 3/24/12, p. 5) included roughly 4 to 4.5 percent Neandertal genes. Modern Europeans’ genetic library includes an average of 2.5 percent Neandertal genes. Human groups that migrated into Europe after 5,000 years ago mated with continental natives and diluted traces of Neandertal genetic ancestry...
  • Neanderthal culture: Old masters

    05/18/2013 11:46:06 AM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 14 replies
    Nature ^ | 15 May 2013 | Tim Appenzeller
    The results of an earlier round of sampling in El Castillo cave, published last June1, showed that the oldest of the paintings, a simple red spot, dates to at least 40,800 years ago, roughly when the first modern humans reached western Europe. Pike and his colleagues think that when they analyse the latest samples, the paintings may turn out to be older still, perhaps by thousands of years -- too old to have been made by modern humans. If so, the artists must have been Neanderthals, the brawny, archaic people who were already living in Europe... An early date for...
  • Unique workshop of Palaeolithic hunters discovered in Silesia

    05/15/2013 7:54:56 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 12 replies
    Naukawpolsce ^ | May 2, 2013 | Szymon Zdziebłowski
    "Tools were made by a specific canon of Neanderthals living in Central Europe. These items have a cutting edge on both sides, they are bifacial" - said Dr. Wisniewski. Tools, including bifaces and asymmetric blades, are made of siliceous rocks, commonly called flint. According to head researcher, Neanderthals made their tools with holders made of antlers, wood or other materials. This is evidenced by the results of the microscopic analysis of similar items discovered in Germany. Among the flint, archaeologists also found fragments of coarse grained crystalline rock used as pestles - support tools in the manufacture of other tools....
  • Ancient DNA reveals Europe's dynamic genetic history

    04/23/2013 5:49:47 PM PDT · by BenLurkin · 71 replies
    phys.org ^ | 6 hours ago
    Ancient DNA recovered from a series of skeletons in central Germany up to 7500 years old has been used to reconstruct the first detailed genetic history of modern Europe. The study, published today in Nature Communications, reveals a dramatic series of events including major migrations from both Western Europe and Eurasia, and signs of an unexplained genetic turnover about 4000-5000 years ago. The research was performed at the University of Adelaide's Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD). Researchers used DNA extracted from bone and teeth samples from prehistoric human skeletons to sequence a group of maternal genetic lineages that are...
  • Trove of Neanderthal Bones Found in Greek Cave

    04/07/2013 5:31:56 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 23 replies
    LiveScience ^ | 1 April 2013 | Charles Choi
    The archaeological deposits of the cave date back to between about 39,000 and 100,000 years ago to the Middle Paleolithic period. During the height of the ice age, the area still possessed a mild climate and supported a wide range of wildlife, including deer, wild boar, rabbits, elephants, weasels, foxes, wolves, leopards, bears, falcons, toads, vipers and tortoises. In the cave, the researchers found tools such as scrapers made of flint, quartz and seashells. The stone tools were all shaped, or knapped, in a way typical of Neanderthal artifacts. Now, the scientists reveal they discovered 14 specimens of child and...
  • Revolutionizing the “Out of Africa” Story

    04/01/2013 5:23:50 AM PDT · by Pharmboy · 14 replies
    Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News ^ | Apr 1, 2013 | Alan R. Templeton, Ph.D.
    The discovery of the structure of DNA and the subsequent developments in genetics and genomics have had a great impact on all of the biological sciences, including human evolution. Our ideas about human evolution 60 years ago came primarily from the fossil and archaeological records. These fields revealed that the last two million years were a dynamic period of our evolutionary history. The human lineage two million years ago was a population with ape-sized brains limited to sub-Saharan Africa. The human lineage expanded into Eurasia around 1.85 million years ago, and our brain size increased throughout the Pleistocene. Anatomically modern...
  • First Love Child of Human, Neanderthal Found

    03/30/2013 4:48:56 AM PDT · by Renfield · 101 replies
    Discovery News ^ | 3-27-2012 | Jennifer Viegas
    The skeletal remains of an individual living in northern Italy 40,000-30,000 years ago are believed to be that of a human/Neanderthal hybrid, according to a paper in PLoS ONE. If further analysis proves the theory correct, the remains belonged to the first known such hybrid, providing direct evidence that humans and Neanderthals interbred. Prior genetic research determined the DNA of people with European and Asian ancestry is 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal. The present study focuses on the individual’s jaw, which was unearthed at a rock-shelter called Riparo di Mezzena in the Monti Lessini region of Italy. Both Neanderthals and...
  • Aboriginal Australian History Finally Resolved

    03/22/2013 3:50:30 AM PDT · by ABrit · 15 replies
    DNA Consultants Blog ^ | October 8, 2011 | Blogger
    We present an Aboriginal Australian genomic sequence obtained from a 100-year-old lock of hair donated by an Aboriginal man from southern Western Australia in the early 20th century. We detect no evidence of European admixture and estimate contamination levels to be below 0.5%. We show that Aboriginal Australians are descendants of an early human dispersal into eastern Asia, possibly 62,000 to 75,000 years ago. This dispersal is separate from the one that gave rise to modern Asians 25,000 to 38,000 years ago. We also find evidence of gene flow between populations of the two dispersal waves prior to the divergence...
  • Human Y Chromosome Much Older Than Previously Thought

    03/21/2013 7:05:11 AM PDT · by Renfield · 15 replies
    UANews ^ | 3-1-2013 | Daniel Stolte
    UA geneticists have discovered the oldest known genetic branch of the human Y chromosome – the hereditary factor determining male sex. The new divergent lineage, which was found in an individual who submitted his DNA to Family Tree DNA, a company specializing in DNA analysis to trace family roots, branched from the Y chromosome tree before the first appearance of anatomically modern humans in the fossil record. The results are published in the American Journal of Human Genetics. "Our analysis indicates this lineage diverged from previously known Y chromosomes about 338,000 ago, a time when anatomically modern humans had not...
  • Researchers Publish Improved Neanderthal Genome

    03/19/2013 7:08:34 PM PDT · by BenLurkin · 12 replies
    abc ^ | March 19, 2013 | FRANK JORDANS
    Researchers in Germany said Tuesday they have completed the first high-quality sequencing of a Neanderthal genome and are making it freely available online for other scientists to study. The genome produced from remains of a toe bone found in a Siberian cave is far more detailed than a previous "draft" Neanderthal genome sequenced three years ago by the same team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. "The genome of a Neanderthal is now there in a form as accurate as that of any person walking the streets today," Svante Paabo, a geneticist who led the...
  • Father of all humankind is 340,000 years old

    03/08/2013 7:34:13 PM PST · by haffast · 54 replies
    Yahoo! News | The Sideshow ^ | Thu, Mar 7, 2013 | Eric Pfeiffer
    DNA evidence has revealed that the oldest known common male ancestor is 340,000 years old, more than twice as old as previous estimates. New Scientist reports that the sample comes from a recently deceased man named Albert Perry. After the African-American South Carolina man died, one of his relatives submitted a sample of his DNA to a company called Family Tree DNA for analysis. snip All previously compared DNA samples pointed to a common Y chromosome traced back to man who lived between 60,000 and 140,000 years ago. But Perry’s DNA sample broke the trend, not matching up with this...
  • Bunnies implicated in the demise of Neanderthals

    03/04/2013 11:15:00 AM PST · by BenLurkin · 55 replies
    new scientist ^ | 18:10 01 March 2013 by | Sara Reardon
    Now, John Fa of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in Trinity, Jersey, says Neanderthals eventually bit the dust because they were unable to adapt their hunting to small animals like rabbits. Fa and his colleagues counted up the skeletons of animals found in three excavation sites in Spain and southern France. Up until 30,000 years ago, the remains of large animals such as deer were abundant in caves. But around that time, coinciding with the disappearance of Neanderthals, rabbit remains became more prevalent. The authors postulate that humans were more successful at switching to catching and eating rabbits. It's not...
  • Stone Age Stew? Soup Making May Be Older Than We'd Thought

    02/08/2013 4:32:28 AM PST · by Renfield · 17 replies
    National Public Radio ^ | 2-6-2013 | Sarah Zielinski
    ...So who concocted that first bowl of soup? Most sources state that soup making did not become commonplace until somewhere between 5,000 and 9,000 years ago. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America says, for example, "boiling was not a commonly used cooking technique until the invention of waterproof and heatproof containers about five thousand years ago." That's probably wrong — by at least 15,000 years. It now looks like waterproof and heatproof containers were invented much earlier than previously thought. Harvard University archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef and colleagues reported last year in Science on their finding of 20,000-year-old...
  • Neanderthals Died Out Earlier Than Thought

    02/05/2013 1:16:36 PM PST · by Pharmboy · 40 replies
    Discovery ^ | FEB 5, 2013 | CHARLENS Q. CHOI
    The last Neanderthals had passed by southern Iberia quite earlier than previously thought. Neanderthals may have died out earlier than before thought, researchers say. These findings hint that Neanderthals did not coexist with modern humans as long as previously suggested, investigators added.Modern humans once shared the planet with now-departed human lineages, including the Neanderthals, our closest known extinct relatives. However, there has been heated debate over just how much time and interaction, or interbreeding, Neanderthals had with modern humans. To help solve the mystery, an international team of researchers investigated 215 bones previously excavated from 11 sites in southern Iberia,...
  • Stone Age hunters liked their carbs

    01/20/2013 6:21:05 PM PST · by Renfield · 23 replies
    ScienceNordic ^ | 1-4-2013 | Tania Lousdal Jensen
    Analyses of Stone Age settlements reveal that the hunters were healthy and would gladly eat anything they could get their hands on, including carbohydrates – contrary to the modern definition of the Paleolithic, or Stone Age diet. The Stone Age hunter’s food contained large amounts of protein from fish, lean mean, herbs and coarse vegetables and has formed the basis of one of today’s hottest health trends: the paleo diet. The modern version of the Stone Age diet excludes foods rich in carbohydrates. This exclusion of carbs is based on the idea that Stone Age hunters didn’t have access to...
  • Wanted: 'Adventurous woman' to give birth to Neanderthal man - ... seeks mother for cloned cave baby

    01/21/2013 10:32:31 AM PST · by Red Badger · 65 replies
    Daily Mail UK ^ | PUBLISHED: 10:36 EST, 20 January 2013 | UPDATED: 04:16 EST, 21 January 2013 | By Allan Hall and Fiona Macrae
    They're usually thought of as a brutish, primitive species. So what woman would want to give birth to a Neanderthal baby? Yet this incredible scenario is the plan of one of the world’s leading geneticists, who is seeking a volunteer to help bring man’s long-extinct close relative back to life. Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA and resurrect the species which became extinct 33,000 years ago. His scheme is reminiscent of Jurassic Park but, while in the film dinosaurs were created in a laboratory, Professor Church’s ambitious plan requires a human volunteer. He...
  • Neanderthal to be born to surrogate mother?

    01/20/2013 7:50:36 PM PST · by BenLurkin · 44 replies
    UnexplainedMysteries.com ^ | Saturday, 19 January, 2013
    There have been indications that a cloning experiment to create a live Neanderthal may be on the cards. While the idea of using DNA from frozen mammoth remains to clone a live specimen is nothing new, the concept that we could do something similar to bring back extinct species of human such as Neanderthals may prove quite a shock to most people. Despite the technical and ethical difficulties inherent in such an endeavor, there are signs that some scientists may be considering research leading up to such an achievement and that they may need a surrogate human mother to deliver...
  • Wanted: 'Adventurous woman' to give birth to Neanderthal man-professor seeks mother for cloned baby

    01/20/2013 9:06:48 PM PST · by 2ndDivisionVet · 70 replies
    The London Daily Mail ^ | January 20, 2013 | Allan Hall and Fiona Macrae
    They're usually thought of as a brutish, primitive species. So what woman would want to give birth to a Neanderthal baby? Yet this incredible scenario is the plan of one of the world’s leading geneticists, who is seeking a volunteer to help bring man’s long-extinct close relative back to life. Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA and resurrect the species which became extinct 33,000 years ago. His scheme is reminiscent of Jurassic Park but, while in the film dinosaurs were created in a laboratory, Professor Church’s ambitious plan requires a human volunteer. He...
  • Clemson student's turtle project takes dark twist

    12/30/2012 9:17:31 AM PST · by ZULU · 92 replies
    Herald on line ^ | December 27, 2012 | Jeffrey Collins
    CLEMSON, S.C. — Clemson University student Nathan Weaver just wanted to put together a project to help figure out the best way to assist turtles in crossing the road. But he also ended up with a peek into the dark souls of some human beings. Read more here: http://www.heraldonline.com/2012/12/27/4507782/clemson-students-turtle-project.html#storylink=cpy
  • Ancient Mariners: Did Neanderthals Sail to Mediterranean?

    11/24/2012 8:17:46 AM PST · by SunkenCiv · 38 replies
    LiveScience ^ | Thursday, November 15, 2012 | Charles Choi
    Neanderthals and other extinct human lineages might have been ancient mariners, venturing to the Mediterranean islands thousands of years earlier than previously thought. This prehistoric seafaring could shed light on the mental capabilities of these lost relatives of modern humans, researchers say. Scientists had thought the Mediterranean islands were first settled about 9,000 years ago by Neolithic or New Stone Age farmers and shepherds... For instance, obsidian from the Aegean island of Melos was uncovered at the mainland Greek coastal site of Franchthi cave in layers that were about 11,000 years old, while excavations on the southern coast of Cyprus...
  • Genetic research confirms that non-Africans are part Neanderthal

    07/18/2011 7:16:57 AM PDT · by decimon · 88 replies
    University of Montreal ^ | July 17, 2011 | Unknown
    Some of the human X chromosome originates from Neanderthals and is found exclusively in people outside Africa, according to an international team of researchers led by Damian Labuda of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Montreal and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center. The research was published in the July issue of Molecular Biology and Evolution. "This confirms recent findings suggesting that the two populations interbred," says Dr. Labuda. His team places the timing of such intimate contacts and/or family ties early on, probably at the crossroads of the Middle East. Neanderthals, whose ancestors left Africa about 400,000 to...
  • Neanderthals smart enough to copy humans [from the UK of course]

    10/31/2012 4:29:30 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 9 replies
    Nature (UK of course) ^ | 30 October 2012 | Brian Switek
    In 2010, Thomas Higham, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues2 used radiocarbon evidence to argue that the bones and tools were mixed together from higher and lower layers of the cave strata, representing different occupations of the site between 45,000 and 28,000 years ago. Some of the artefacts might have been created by modern humans but then settled down into the Neanderthal layers. Today, Jean-Jacques Hublin, an archaeologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the fossils and...
  • How scientists recreated Neanderthal man

    10/23/2012 10:06:27 AM PDT · by Renfield · 29 replies
    BBC ^ | 10-23-2012
    A team of scientists has created what it believes is the first really accurate reconstruction of Neanderthal man, from a skeleton that was discovered in France over a century ago. In 1909, excavations at La Ferrassie cave in the Dordogne unearthed the remains of a group of Neanderthals. One of the skeletons in that group was that of an adult male, given the name La Ferrassie 1. These remains have helped scientists create a detailed reconstruction of our closest prehistoric relative for a new BBC series, Prehistoric Autopsy. La Ferrassie 1 is one of the most important discoveries made in...
  • A Neanderthal trove in Madrid

    10/05/2012 5:25:53 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 20 replies
    el Pais ^ | September 23, 2012 | Alicia Rivera Pinilla del Valle
    The Lozoya River Valley, in the Madrid mountain range of Guadarrama, could easily be called "Neanderthal Valley," says the paleontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga. "It is protected by two strings of mountains, it is rich in fauna, it is a privileged spot from an environmental viewpoint, and it is ideal for the Neanderthal, given that it provided the[m] with good hunting grounds." ... "There are around 15 sites in Spain: in the Cantabrian mountain range, along the eastern Mediterranean coast and in Andalusia, but none on the plateau, where there are no limestone formations and no adequate caves to preserve human...
  • When humans broke off sex with neanderthals

    10/05/2012 12:48:49 PM PDT · by Sopater · 136 replies
    Fox News ^ | October 05, 2012 | Charles Choi
    Neanderthals apparently last interbred with the ancestors of today's Europeans after modern humans with advanced stone tools expanded out of Africa, researchers say. The last sex between Neanderthals and modern humans likely occurred as recently as 47,000 years ago, the researchers added. Modern humans once shared the globe with now-departed human lineages, including the Neanderthals, our closest known extinct relatives. Neanderthals had been around for about 30,000 years when modern humans appeared in the fossil record about 200,000 years ago. Neanderthals disappeared about 30,000 year ago. In 2010, scientists completed the first sequence of the Neanderthal genome using DNA extracted...
  • Neanderthals and human lived side by side in Middle Eastern caves and even interbred

    09/30/2012 5:19:02 AM PDT · by Renfield · 131 replies
    Daily Mail (UK) ^ | 9-29-2012
    Neanderthals may have lived side by side with early humans and possibly interbred with them, according to new research. Stone axes and sharp flint arrowheads of both branches of the human race have been discovered in limestone caves in northern Israel. The findings, reported in the Times, have led archeologists to believe the two sub-species found harmony in a coastal mountain range that today is in a state of war with its neighbours...
  • DNA Unveils Enigmatic Denisovans

    09/29/2012 1:04:30 PM PDT · by blam · 19 replies
    Science News ^ | 9-22-2012 | Bruce Bower
    DNA Unveils Enigmatic Denisovans Extinct Neandertal relatives serve up a complete genetic playbook By Bruce BowerScience News September 22nd, 2012; Vol.182 #6 (p. 5) A replica of a partial Denisovan finger bone, placed on its corresponding position on a person’s hand, emphasizes the small size of this ancient find. Scientists have retrieved a comprehensive set of genetic instructions from the actual Denisovan finger fossil. Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Genetic data of unprecedented completeness have been pulled from the fossil remains of a young Stone Age woman. The DNA helps illuminate the relationships among her group — ancient Siberians...
  • Neanderthals used feathers as 'personal ornaments'

    09/18/2012 12:26:03 PM PDT · by BenLurkin · 31 replies
    bbc ^ | 17 September 2012 | Paul Rincon
    Clive Finlayson and Kimberly Brown from the Gibraltar Museum, along with colleagues from Spain, Canada and Belgium, examined a database of 1,699 ancient sites across Eurasia, comparing data on birds at locations used by humans with those that were not. They found a clear association between raptor and corvid remains and sites that had been occupied by humans. They then looked more closely at bird bones found at Neanderthal sites in Gibraltar, including Gorham's and Vanguard cave, near the base of the rock: "The Neanderthals had cut through and marked the bones. But what were they cutting? We realised a...
  • Most Neanderthals Were Right-Handed Like Us

    08/26/2012 9:13:15 AM PDT · by Renfield · 54 replies
    Live Science ^ | 8-24-2012 | Megan Gannon
    Right-handed humans vastly outnumber lefties by a ratio of about nine to one, and the same may have been true for Neanderthals. Researchers say right-hand dominance in the extinct species suggests that, like humans, they also had the capacity for language. A new analysis of the skeleton of a 20-something Neanderthal man confirms that he was a righty like most of his European caveman cousins whose remains have been studied by scientists (16 of 18 specimens). Dubbed "Regourdou," the skeleton was discovered in 1957 in France, not far from the famous network of caves at Lascaux....
  • Neanderthal and Human Matings Get a Date

    08/21/2012 3:03:26 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 33 replies
    Smithsonian 'blogs ^ | August 15, 2012 | Erin Wayman
    Two years ago the analysis of the Neanderthal genome revealed modern humans carry Neanderthal DNA, implying our ancestors mated with Neanderthals at some point in the past. Scientists only found genetic traces of Neanderthals in non-African people, leading to the conclusion that Neanderthal-human matings must have occurred as modern humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world. A new paper (PDF) posted on arXiv.org puts a date on those matings: 47,000 to 65,000 years ago... To determine what really happened, Sankararaman's team looked at rates of genetic change to estimate when Neanderthals and humans last exchanged genes. If...
  • HUMANS, NEANDERTHALS DID NOT HAVE BABIES

    08/17/2012 9:37:26 AM PDT · by Pharmboy · 149 replies
    Discovery News ^ | Aug 16, 2012 | Anon
    Recent research strikes a blow to the theory that humans and Neanderthals interbred. THE GIST Studies over the last two years suggest that Neanderthals vanished more than 30,000 years ago. This would mean that early humans and Neanderthals could not have interbred. enlarge Over the last two years, several studies have suggested that Homo sapiens got it on with Neanderthals, an hominid who lived in parts of Europe, Central Asia and the Middle East for up to 300,000 years but vanished more than 30,000 years ago. The evidence for this comes from fossil DNA, which shows that on average Eurasians...
  • 300 000 year old flint tools found in Northern France

    07/17/2012 8:15:24 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 24 replies
    Past Horizons ^ | Monday, July 16, 2012 | Source: INRAP
    The deposits at Etricourt Manancourt in the Picardie region of France documents the history of early European settlements, revealing at least five prehistoric levels, ranging between 300,000 and 80,000 years old... Archaeologists from Inrap looked at 17 hectares in 2010, which revealed a Palaeolithic level and more evidence was found in 2012, when 3,200 square metres were excavated over 4 month period. The most recent occupation comes from the Middle Paleolithic (80,000 years old) and belongs to the Neanderthals. Twenty sites of this period are already known in northern France. The next two levels are also Neanderthal and belong to...
  • Neanderthal Arm Morphology Caused by Scraping, Not Spear Thrusting

    07/21/2012 6:55:13 AM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 18 replies
    Popular Archaeology ^ | Wednesday, July 18, 2012 | PLoS ONE
    It was scraping hide, not thrusting spears, that caused dominant strength on their right sides. Unique arm morphology in Neandertals was likely caused by scraping activities such as hide preparation, not spear thrusting as previously theorized, according to research published July 18 in the open access journal PLoS ONE*. The researchers, led by Colin Shaw of the University of Cambridge, took muscle measurements of modern men performing three different spear thrusting tasks and four different scraping tasks. They found that muscle activity was significantly higher on the left side of the body for spear thrusting tasks relative to the right...
  • Neanderthals Had Knowledge Of Plant Healing Qualities

    07/19/2012 9:56:13 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 24 replies
    redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports ^ | Thursday, July 19, 2012 | Naturwissenschaften
    A team of researchers has provided the first molecular evidence that Neanderthals not only ate a range of cooked plant foods, but also understood their nutritional and medicinal qualities... The researchers, led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the University of York, combined pyrolysis gas-chromatography-mass spectrometry with morphological analysis of plant microfossils to identify material trapped in dental calculus (calcified dental plaque) from five Neanderthals from the north Spanish site of El Sidrón. Their results provide another twist to the story -- the first molecular evidence for medicinal plants being used by a Neanderthal individual. According to a prepared...
  • Spain claims top spot for world’s oldest cave art (Is it a Neanderthal "painting?")

    06/15/2012 8:06:11 AM PDT · by LibWhacker · 11 replies
    Nature ^ | 6/14/12 | Ewen Callaway
    Archaeologists say red disk that is more than 40,000 years old could have been painted by Neanderthals. [Snip... Photos at link] It’s no Mona Lisa, but a smudged red disk in northern Spain has been crowned the world’s earliest cave painting. Dated to more than 40,800 years ago, the shape was painted by some of the first modern humans to reach the Iberian Peninsula — or it may have been done by Neanderthals, residents of the Iberian peninsula for more than 200,000 years. “There is a very good chance that this is Neanderthal,” says Alistair Pike, an archaeological scientist at...
  • New dating puts cave art in the age of Neanderthals

    06/15/2012 9:26:33 AM PDT · by JoeProBono · 25 replies
    post-gazette ^ | June 15, 2012 | John Noble Wilford
    Stone Age artists were painting red disks, handprints, clublike symbols and geometric patterns on European cave walls long before previously thought, in some cases more than 40,000 years ago, scientists reported Thursday, after completing more reliable dating tests that raised a possibility that Neanderthals were the artists. A more likely situation, the researchers said, is that the art -- 50 samples from 11 caves in northwestern Spain-- was created by anatomically modern humans fairly soon after their arrival in Europe. The findings seem to put an exclamation point to a run of recent discoveries: direct evidence from fossils that Homo...
  • Famous Cave Paintings Might Not Be From Humans

    06/15/2012 8:47:02 AM PDT · by dead · 80 replies
    NPR.org ^ | June 15, 2012 | Christopher Joyce
    The famous paintings on the walls of caves in Europe mark the beginning of figurative art and a great leap forward for human culture. But now a novel method of determining the age of some of those cave paintings questions their provenance. Not that they're fakes — only that it might not have been modern humans who made them. The first European cave paintings are thought to have been made over 30,000 years ago. Most depict animals and hunters. Some of the eeriest are stencils of human hands, apparently made by blowing a spray of pigment over a hand held...
  • Scientists are accused of distorting theory of human evolution by misdating bones

    06/13/2012 3:28:02 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 18 replies
    The Observer ^ | Saturday, June 9, 2012 | Robin McKie
    Britain's leading expert on human evolution, Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, has warned in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology that the team in charge of La Sima has got the ages of its fossils wrong by 200,000 years and has incorrectly identified the species of ancient humans found there. Far from being a 600,000-year-old lair of a species called Homo heidelbergensis, he believes the pit is filled with Neanderthal remains that are no more than 400,000 years old. The difference in interpretation has crucial implications for understanding human evolution... La Sima de los Huesos was discovered by potholers...
  • Humanity's Best Friend: How Dogs May Have Helped Humans Beat the Neanderthals

    05/15/2012 11:00:12 AM PDT · by Theoria · 44 replies
    The Atlantic ^ | 14 May 2012 | Megan Garber
    Over 20,000 years ago, humans won the evolutionary battle against Neanderthals. They may have had some assistance in that from their best friends. One of the most compelling -- and enduring -- mysteries in archaeology concerns the rise of early humans and the decline of Neanderthals. For about 250,000 years, Neanderthals lived and evolved, quite successfully, in the area that is now Europe. Somewhere between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago, early humans came along.They proliferated in their new environment, their population increasing tenfold in the 10,000 years after they arrived; Neanderthals declined and finally died away. What happened? What went...
  • DNA analysis shakes up Neandertal theories

    04/06/2012 10:21:33 PM PDT · by SunkenCiv · 31 replies
    Binghamton.edu ^ | April 4, 2012 | Gail Glover
    Focusing on mitochondrial DNA sequences from 13 Neandertal individuals, including a new sequence from the site of Valdegoba cave in northern Spain, the research team found some surprising results. When they started looking at the DNA, a clear pattern emerged. Neandertal individuals from Western Europe that were older than 50,000 years and individuals from sites in western Asia and the Middle East showed a high degree of genetic variation, on par with what might be expected from a species that had been abundant in an area for a long period of time. In fact, the amount of genetic variation was...
  • Genetic Studies of Modern Populations Show Varying Neandertal Ancestry

    03/20/2012 4:55:36 AM PDT · by Renfield · 83 replies · 2+ views
    The complex world of human genetics research speaks a language unfamiliar to most of us, but it has opened up a new window on our understanding of the dynamics of ancient populations; and few areas of research have been more tantalizing than that surrounding the questions of how modern humans are related to the Neandertals, an ancient species of human whose morphology or physical characteristics disappeared from the human fossil record roughly 30,000 years ago. The most recent studies have provided evidence about when the Neandertal (Homo neandertalensis) and modern human populations (Homo sapiens) first diverged from a common ancestral...
  • Neanderthals were ancient mariners

    03/02/2012 7:31:23 AM PST · by Renfield · 55 replies
    New Scientist ^ | 2-29-2012 | Michael Marshall
    IT LOOKS like Neanderthals may have beaten modern humans to the seas. Growing evidence suggests our extinct cousins criss-crossed the Mediterranean in boats from 100,000 years ago - though not everyone is convinced they weren't just good swimmers. Neanderthals lived around the Mediterranean from 300,000 years ago. Their distinctive "Mousterian" stone tools are found on the Greek mainland and, intriguingly, have also been found on the Greek islands of Lefkada, Kefalonia and Zakynthos. That could be explained in two ways: either the islands weren't islands at the time, or our distant cousins crossed the water somehow....
  • 'The Oldest (Neanderthal) Work Of Art Ever': 42,000-Year-Old Paintings Of Seals Found In Spain

    02/08/2012 10:36:42 AM PST · by blam · 89 replies · 1+ views
    The Daily Mail ^ | 2-7-2012 | Tom Worden
    'The Oldest (Neanderthal) Work Of Art Ever': 42,000-Year-Old Paintings Of Seals Found In Spanish Cave* Six paintings were found in the Nerja Caves, 35miles east of Malaga * They are the only known artistic images created by Neanderthal man By Tom Worden Last updated at 9:27 PM on 7th February 2012 Comments (38) Share The world's oldest works of art have been found in a cave on Spain's Costa del Sol, scientists believe. Six paintings of seals are at least 42,000 years old and are the only known artistic images created by Neanderthal man, experts claim. Professor Jose Luis Sanchidrian,...
  • Modern flint expert 'reverse engineers' Neanderthal stone axes... our ancestors were...

    01/26/2012 8:19:28 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 39 replies
    Daily Mail ^ | January 24th, 2012 | Rob Waugh
    Researchers at the University of Kent have recreated the processes Neanderthals used to produce sharp flint axes, and found that our ancestors were skilled engineers. A modern-day 'flintknapper' replicated the sharpening processes that Neanderthals used to create tools -- a sort of modern 'reverse engineering' of ancient techniques in use by three kinds of early 'hominin' including Neanderthals as early as 300,000 years ago. The researchers found that Neanderthals could shape 'elegant' stone tools -- shaping them to be hard-wearing, easily sharpened and with a perfectly balanced centre of gravity. The reproduction of how Neanderthals worked shows that it is...
  • Into the mind of a Neanderthal

    01/21/2012 5:48:42 AM PST · by SunkenCiv · 55 replies
    New Scientist ^ | Wednesday, January 18, 2012 | Thomas Wynn
    Palaeoanthropologists now know a great deal about these ice-age Europeans who flourished between 200,000 and 30,000 years ago. We know, for example, that Neanderthals shared about 99.84 per cent of their DNA with us, and that we and they evolved separately for several hundred thousand years. We also know Neanderthal brains were a bit larger than ours and were shaped a bit differently. And we know where they lived, what they ate and how they got it. Skeletal evidence shows that Neanderthal men, women and children led very strenuous lives, preoccupied with hunting large mammals. They often made tactical use...
  • Viewpoint: Has 'one species' idea been put to bed?

    12/30/2011 12:06:29 PM PST · by decimon · 22 replies
    BBC ^ | December 30, 2011 | Clive Finlayson
    Here, Prof Clive Finlayson looks back at the year's developments in human evolution research and asks whether recent discoveries rule out a well known idea about our ancestors.Hobbits on Flores, Denisovans in Siberia, Neanderthals across Eurasia and our very own ancestors. Given this array of human diversity in the Late Pleistocene, we might well be forgiven for thinking that Ernst Mayr's contention that "in spite of much geographical variation, never more than one species of man existed on Earth at any one time" had finally been put to bed. It now seems that a high degree of diversity was also...
  • Last Neanderthals near the Arctic Circle?

    12/29/2011 10:14:08 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 33 replies
    Past Horizons ^ | Tuesday, December 27, 2011 | CNRS press release
    Dating of butchery marks crucial A multi-disciplinary team of French CNRS researchers, working with Norwegian and Russian scientists, studied the Byzovaya site in the Polar Urals in northern Russia. Using carbon 14 dating and an optical simulation technique, the team was able to put an accurate date on sediments and on mammoth and reindeer bones abandoned on the site. The bones bore traces of butchering by Mousterian hunters. The results intrigue scientists in more ways than one. They show that Mousterian culture may have lasted longer than scientists had originally thought. What's more, no Mousterian presence had ever been identified...
  • We do have bigger brains than Neanderthals did

    12/14/2011 9:58:08 PM PST · by SunkenCiv · 12 replies
    MSNBC ^ | Tuesday, December 13, 2011 | Livescience
    Modern humans possess brain structures larger than their Neanderthal counterparts, suggesting we are distinguished from them by different mental capacities, scientists find. We are currently the only extant human lineage, but Neanderthals, our closest-known evolutionary relatives, still walked the Earth as recently as maybe 24,000 years ago. Neanderthals were close enough to the modern human lineage to interbreed, calling into question how different they really were from us and whether they comprise a different species. To find out more, researchers used CT scanners to map the interiors of five Neanderthal skulls as well as four fossil and 75 contemporary human...
  • New ancestor? Scientists ponder DNA from Siberia

    03/24/2010 12:16:23 PM PDT · by decimon · 24 replies · 628+ views
    Associated Press ^ | Mar 24, 2010 | MALCOLM RITTER
    NEW YORK – In the latest use of DNA to investigate the story of humankind, scientists have decoded genetic material from an unidentified human ancestor that lived in Siberia and concluded it might be a new member of the human family tree. The DNA doesn't match modern humans or Neanderthals, two species that lived in that area around the same time — 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. > But "the human family tree has got a lot of branchings. It's entirely plausible there are a lot of branches out there we don't know about." >
  • DNA identifies new ancient human dubbed 'X-woman'

    03/24/2010 1:38:44 PM PDT · by smokingfrog · 35 replies · 1,491+ views
    BBC ^ | 3-24-10 | Paul Rincon
    Scientists have identified a previously unknown type of ancient human through analysis of DNA from a finger bone unearthed in a Siberian cave. The extinct "hominin" (human like creature) lived in Central Asia between 48,000 and 30,000 years ago. An international team has sequenced genetic material from the fossil showing that it is distinct from that of Neanderthals and modern humans. Details of the find, dubbed "X-woman", have been published in Nature journal. Ornaments were found in the same ground layer as the finger bone, including a bracelet. Professor Chris Stringer, human origins researcher at London's Natural History Museum, called...