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Neanderthals disappeared from Earth more than 20,000 years ago, but figuring out why continues to challenge anthropologists. One team of scientists, however, now says they have evidence to back climate change as the main culprit. The Iberian Peninsula, better known as present-day Spain and Portugal, was one of the last Neanderthal refuges. Many scientists have thought that out-hunting by Homo sapiens and interbreeding with them brought Neanderthals to their demise, but climate change has also been proposed. Francisco Jiménez-Espejo, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Granada in Spain, says a lack of evidence has left climate change weakly supported—until now....

IT IS possibly the longest-running murder mystery of them all. What, or even who, killed humankind's nearest relatives, the Neanderthals who once roamed Europe before dying out almost 30,000 years ago? Suspects have ranged from the climate to humans themselves, and the mystery has deeply divided experts. Now 30 scientists have come together to publish the most definitive answer yet to this enigma. They say Neanderthals simply did not have the technological know-how to survive the increasingly harsh winters. And intriguingly, rather than being Neanderthal killers, the original human settlers of Europe almost suffered the same fate. Ice cores recovered...

The discovery of a 55,000-year-old partial skull of a modern human in an Israeli cave, the first sighting of Homo sapiens in this time and place, offers skeletal evidence to support the idea that Neandertals and moderns mated in the Middle East between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. What's more, the skull could belong to an ancestor of the modern humans who later swept across Europe and Asia and replaced the Neandertals. The find supports a raft of recent genetic studies. A 2010 analysis, for example, found that up to 2% of the genomes of today's Europeans and Asians consist...

Charles Q. Choi, LiveScience January 27, 2015An ancient human fossil discovered from the seafloor near Taiwan reveals that a primitive group of humans, potentially an unknown species, once lived in Asia, researchers say. These findings suggest that multiple lineages of extinct humans may have coexisted in Asia before the arrival of modern humans in the region about 40,000 years ago, the scientists added. Although modern humans, Homo sapiens, are the only surviving human lineage, others once walked the globe. Extinct human lineages once found in Asia include Neanderthals, the closest extinct relatives of modern humans; Denisovans, whose genetic legacy may...

Researchers from George Washington University and the Smithsonian Institution have discovered evidence to debunk the theory that Neandertals' disappearance was caused in part by a deficient diet -- one that lacked variety and was overly reliant on meat. After discovering starch granules from plant food trapped in the dental calculus on 40-thousand-year-old Neandertal teeth, the scientists believe that Neandertals ate a wide variety of plants and included cooked grains as part of a more sophisticated, diverse diet similar to early modern humans... The discovery of starch granules in the calculus on Neandertal teeth provides direct evidence that they made sophisticated,...

A multi-purpose bone tool dating from the Neanderthal era has been discovered by University of Montreal researchers, throwing into question our current understanding of the evolution of human behaviour. It was found at an archaeological site in France... Neanderthals lived in Europe and western Asia in the Middle Paleolithic between around 250,000 to 28,000 years ago. Homo sapiens is the scientific term for modern man. The production of bone tools by Neanderthals is open to debate. For much of the twentieth century, prehistoric experts were reluctant to recognize the ability of this species to incorporate materials like bone into their...

For a species that went extinct more than 25,000 years ago, 2008 has been a hell of a year for Neanderthals. The ancient humans got their first complete mitochondrial genome sequence, their stone tools turned out every bit as efficient as ours, and we even heard them speak. Here are some of our favourite Neanderthal discoveries of 2008. Genome secrets revealedBig nose strikes againOur brainy cousinsMore DNA revelationsA voice from the pastMaking themselves prettyMaster tool makersThe butchers of Gibraltar

In 1981, when Wil Roebroeks of Leiden University was beginning his archaeological career, he ran across some red stains in the grayish sediments on the floodplain of the Maas River where his team was excavating. The site, called Maastricht-Belvèdère, in The Netherlands, was occupied by Neanderthals at least 200,000 years ago. Roebroeks collected and stored samples of the red stains, and 30 years later he received funding to analyze them. It became apparent that he and his team had discovered the earliest evidence of hominins using the mineral iron oxide, also known as ocher. Until now, the use of...

It appeared to be one of archaeology's most sensational finds. The skull fragment discovered in a peat bog near Hamburg was more than 36,000 years old - and was the vital missing link between modern humans and Neanderthals. This, at least, is what Professor Reiner Protsch von Zieten - a distinguished, cigar-smoking German anthropologist - told his scientific colleagues, to global acclaim, after being invited to date the extremely rare skull. However, the professor's 30-year-old academic career has now ended in disgrace after the revelation that he systematically falsified the dates on this and numerous other "stone age" relics. Yesterday...

Belgrade, city of very tumultuous history, one of the oldest in Europe. Its history has lasted for 7000 years. The area around the large rivers was inhabited in the Paleolithic period. From the older stone age, came the remains of human bones and skulls of Neanderthals, found in a quarry near Leštane, in a cave in the vicinity of the Cukarica Bajloni market. Remains of late Stone Age culture were found in Vinca, Zarkovo and Upper Town, above the confluence of the Sava and Danube. This indicates that the area of Belgrade has been continually inhabited and that the intensity...

PARIS (AFP) – Experts on prehistoric man are rethinking their dates after a find in a southern French valley suggested our ancestors may have reached Europe 1.57 million years ago: 200,000 years earlier than we thought. What provoked the recount was a pile of fossilised bones and teeth uncovered 15 years ago by local man Jean Rouvier in a basalt quarry at Lezignan la Cebe, in the Herault valley, Languedoc. In the summer of 2008, Rouvier mentioned his find to Jerome Ivorra, an archaeological researcher at France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). The subsequent dig uncovered a large variety...

MADRID, Spain - A small piece of jawbone unearthed in a cave in Spain is the oldest known fossil of a human ancestor in Europe and suggests that people lived on the continent much earlier than previously believed, scientists say. The researchers said the fossil found last year at Atapuerca in northern Spain, along with stone tools and animal bones, is up to 1.3 million years old. That would be 500,000 years older than remains from a 1997 find that prompted the naming of a new species: Homo antecessor, or Pioneer Man, possibly a common ancestor to Neanderthals and modern...

Researchers have identified what they say are the oldest-known musical instruments in the world.The flutes, made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, come from a cave in southern Germany which contains early evidence for the occupation of Europe by modern humans - Homo sapiens. Scientists used carbon dating to show that the flutes were between 42,000 and 43,000 years old. The findings are described in the Journal of Human Evolution. A team led by Prof Tom Higham at Oxford University dated animal bones in the same ground layers as the flutes at Geissenkloesterle Cave in Germany's Swabian Jura. Prof Nick...

Found in a German cave, suggesting humans were piping tunes from bone and ivory flutes more than 35,000 years ago, new research has shown. Scientists discovered remains of the instruments in a German cave once populated by some of the first modern humans to settle in Europe after leaving Africa. Instrument has five finger holes and two deep V-shaped notches at one end The finds suggest that our oldest ancestors in Europe had a well-established musical tradition. The most significant discovery was a complete flute made from a griffon vulture bone. Measuring 21.8cm, with a diameter of about 8mm, the...

AP Photo/Daniel Maurer A bird-bone flute unearthed in a German cave was carved some 35,000 years ago and is the oldest handcrafted musical instrument yet discovered, archaeologists say, offering the latest evidence that early modern humans in Europe had established a complex and creative culture.

That we would have a scale virtually unique to that flute (possibly matching some other obscure scale in some parts of the world, but not matching any known historically widespread scale in use). The problem with this non-conclusion is that since the hole-spacings discussed in this essay have only a one-in-hundreds chance to match a pattern of 4 notes in the diatonic major/minor scales, then this conclusion would require accepting a remarkable against-the-odds coincidence of spacings.

A study of a rock engraving discovered within Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar finds that the cross-hatched impression was likely created by Neanderthals and excluding the possibility of an unintentional or utilitarian origin, would represent Neanderthals' capacity for abstract expression. Previously-discovered cave art has been exclusively attributed to modern humans, who arrived in Western Europe around 40,000 years ago. In July 2012, researchers discovered the abstract pattern engraved in the rock of Gorham's Cave which is located on the southeast face of the Rock of Gibraltar. The cross-hatched pattern was overlain by undisturbed sediment in which Neanderthal artefacts had previously been...

Ancient and Modern Europeans Have Surprising Genetic Connection by Charles Q. Choi, Live Science Contributor | November 06, 2014 There is a surprising genetic unity between the earliest known Europeans and contemporary Europeans, ancient DNA reveals. This finding suggests that a complex network of sexual exchange may have existed across Europe over the past 50,000 years, and also helps to pinpoint when modern humans interbred with Neanderthals, the closest extinct relatives of modern humans, the researchers said. The origin of contemporary Europeans continues to be debated. The modern human ancestors of contemporary Eurasians are believed to have left Africa about...

The study also uncovers a more accurate timescale for when humans and Neanderthals interbred, and finds evidence for an early contact between the European hunter-gatherers and those in the Middle East – who would later develop agriculture and disperse into Europe about 8,000 years ago, transforming the European gene pool. Scientists now believe Eurasians separated into at least three populations earlier than 36,000 years ago: Western Eurasians, East Asians and a mystery third lineage, all of whose descendants would develop the unique features of most non-African peoples - but not before some interbreeding with Neanderthals took place. Led by the...

Nicholas Wade, a British-born science reporter and editor for more than 30 years with The New York Times, is no longer with the newspaper — just days after the release of his latest book, in which he depicts blacks with roots in sub-Saharan Africa as genetically less adapted to modern life than whites and Asians. Was The New York Times uncomfortable with Wade’s science or his conclusions? It’s unclear. Neither Wade nor his former employer returned requests for comment. Wade’s last Times article appeared April 24. His Penguin Press book “A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History” arrived in...