Free Republic

An international team, led by researchers at the Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, have extracted and sequenced protein from a Neanderthal from Shanidar Cave, Iraq dating to approximately 75,000 years old. It is rare to recover protein of this age, and remarkable to be able to determine the constituent amino acid sequence. This is the oldest fossil protein ever sequenced. Protein sequences may be used in a similar way to DNA, to provide information on the genetic relationships between extinct and living species. As ancient DNA rarely survives, this new method opens...

After excavating a cache of Neandertal fossils about 100 years ago at Krapina Cave in what's now Croatia, researchers concluded that incisions on the ancient individuals' bones showed that they had been butchered and presumably eaten by their comrades. That claim has proved difficult to confirm. A new, high-tech analysis indicates that the Krapina Neandertals ritually dismembered corpses in ways that must have held symbolic meaning for the group-whether or not Neandertals ate those remains. Neandertals apparently possessed a facility for abstract thought that has often been regarded as unique to modern Homo sapiens, says study director Jill Cook of...

German and U.S. scientists have launched a project to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome, the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology said Wednesday. The project, which involves isolating genetic fragments from fossils of the prehistoric beings who originally inhabited Europe, is being carried out at the Leipzig-based institute. [snip] "Firstly, we will learn a lot about the Neanderthals. Secondly, we will learn a lot about the uniqueness of human beings. And thirdly, it's simply cool," Rubin said. [snip]

Neanderthal-human hybrid 'a myth' Monday, 10 December 2007 Jennifer Viegas Discovery News This 29,000 year old skull belonged to a hominid with slightly heavier eyebrows than an average person. But this is not enough to convince anthropologists it's evidence of a human-Neanderthal hybrid (Source: Dan Grigorescu) Did modern humans interbreed with Neanderthals and, if so, did the mating result in a half-human, half-Neanderthal hybrid? The answer is possibly 'yes' to the interbreeding but 'no' to the hybrid, according to the authors of a new study that is already making waves among anthropologists. At the centre of the study, published online...

Spanish researchers say they have found that a gene in modern humans that makes some people dislike a bitter chemical called phenylthiocarbamide, or PTC, was also present in Neanderthals hundreds of thousands of years ago... The scientists made the discovery after recovering and sequencing a fragment of the TAS2R38 gene taken from 48,000-year-old Neanderthal bones found at a site in El Sidron, in northern Spain, they said in a report released Wednesday by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)... Substances similar to PTC give a bitter taste to green vegetables such as Brussels sprouts, broccoli and cabbage as well...

Abstract: In Eurasia, the period between 40,000 and 30,000 BP saw the replacement of Neandertals by anatomically modern humans (AMH) during and after the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition. The human fossil record for this period is very poorly defined with no overlap between Neandertals and AMH on the basis of direct dates. Four new 14C dates were obtained on the two adult Neandertals from Spy (Belgium). The results show that Neandertals survived to at least 36,000 BP in Belgium and that the Spy fossils may be associated to the Lincombian-Ranisian-Jerzmanowician, a transitional techno-complex defined in northwest Europe and recognized...

They have found that a gene in modern humans that makes some people dislike a bitter chemical called phenylthiocarbamide, or PTC, was also present in Neanderthals hundreds of thousands of years ago. The scientists made the discovery after recovering and sequencing a fragment of the TAS2R38 gene taken from 48,000-year-old Neanderthal bones found at a site in El Sidron, in northern Spain, they said in a report released Wednesday by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). "This indicates that variation in bitter taste perception predates the divergence of the lineages leading to Neanderthals and modern humans," they said. Substances similar...

Enlarge ImageTrick or treat? This confection may be more pleasing to some taste buds than it is to others. Credit: Photos.com If you take your coffee without sugar or your pancakes without syrup, chances are you've got some European ancestry in your blood. New research reveals that people whose early relatives lived in Europe are more sensitive to sweet tastes than those whose ancestors came from other parts of the world. Scientists led by Alexey Fushan of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland, asked 144 people from various ethnic backgrounds to rank the...

Key Concepts * Neandertals, our closest relatives, ruled Europe and western Asia for more than 200,000 years. But sometime after 28,000 years ago, they vanished. * Scientists have long debated what led to their disappearance. The latest extinction theories focus on climate change and subtle differences in behavior and biology that might have given modern humans an advantage over the Neandertals.

Newly analyzed remains suggest that a modern human killed a Neanderthal man in what is now Iraq between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago. The finding is scant but tantalizing evidence for a theory that modern humans helped to kill off the Neanderthals. The probable weapon of choice: A thrown spear. The evidence: A lethal wound on the remains of a Neanderthal skeleton.

DURHAM, N.C. -- The wound that ultimately killed a Neandertal man between 50,000 and 75,000 years was most likely caused by a thrown spear, the kind modern humans used but Neandertals did not, according to Duke University-led research. "What we've got is a rib injury, with any number of scenarios that could explain it," said Steven Churchill, an associate professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke. "We're not suggesting there was a blitzkrieg, with modern humans marching across the land and executing the Neandertals. I want to say that loud and clear." But Churchill's analysis indicates the wound was from a...

Sometime between 28,000 and 30,000 years ago, an anatomically modern human in what is now France may have eaten a Neanderthal child and made a necklace out of its teeth, according to a new study that suggests Europe's first humans had a violent relationship with their muscular, big-headed hominid ancestors. The evidence, which includes teeth and a carefully butchered jawbone from a site called Les Rois in southwestern France, could represent the world's first known biological proof for direct contact between the two human groups.

Infectious disease carried by Homo sapiens was responsible for the demise of the Neanderthal, according to a new theory Scientists seeking to uncover the mystery of what happened to the Neanderthals should look to the modus operandi of another great... Scientists seeking to uncover the mystery of what happened to the Neanderthals should look to the modus operandi of another great die-off 30,000 years later, argues a Danish expert in an article submitted to the Journal of Archaeological Science. In the article, professor emeritus Bent Sørensen of the University of Roskilde wrote that disease carried by Homo sapiens migrating out...

Necessity compelled Neanderthals to wear tailored clothing and dry hunks of big game meat, according to a new study on the survival needs of these now-extinct prehistoric humans. > Additional new research by Sorensen determined these sophisticated, rough-and-ready humans probably started to go extinct around 35,000 years ago due to diseases carried by modern humans, with whom they coexisted and may have mated with at the time. >

Scientists in Leiden, in the Netherlands, have unveiled the specimen -- a fragment from the front of a skull belonging to a young adult male. Analysis of chemical "isotopes" in the 30,000-60,000-year-old fossil suggest a carnivorous diet, matching results from other Neanderthal specimens... The Neanderthal frontal bone is the first known "archaic" human specimen to have been recovered from the sea bed anywhere in the world. It was found among animal remains and stone artefacts dredged up 15km off the coast of the Netherlands in 2001. The fragment was spotted by Luc Anthonis, a private fossil collector from Belgium, in...

Sometime between 28,000 and 30,000 years ago, an anatomically modern human in what is now France may have eaten a Neanderthal child and made a necklace out of its teeth, according to a new study that suggests Europe's first humans had a violent relationship with their muscular, big-headed hominid ancestors. The evidence, which includes teeth and a carefully butchered jawbone from a site called Les Rois in southwestern France, could represent the world's first known biological proof for direct contact between the two human groups.

A fossil discovery bears marks of butchering similar to those made when cutting up a deerOne of science's most puzzling mysteries - the disappearance of the Neanderthals - may have been solved. Modern humans ate them, says a leading fossil expert. The controversial suggestion follows publication of a study in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences about a Neanderthal jawbone apparently butchered by modern humans. Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace.

Dutch researcher Gerrit Dusseldorp analysed their daily forays for food to gain insights into the complex behaviour of the Neandertal. His analysis revealed that the hunting was very knowledge intensive. Although it is now clear that Neandertals were hunters and not scavengers, their exact hunting methods are still something of a mystery... His analysis of two archaeological sites revealed that Neandertals in warm forested areas preferred to hunt solitary game but that in colder, less forested areas they preferred to hunt the more difficult to capture herding animals... Rhinoceroses, bisons and even predators such as the brown bear were all...

Researchers working in Iceland said on Sunday they identified a genetic pattern that makes some Europeans more fertile. The genetic pattern, known as an inversion, is a stretch of the DNA code that runs backwards in people who carry it. Usually, such rearrangements of a chromosome are harmful to carriers. But this one causes carriers to have more children each generation -- giving them what is known as a selective advantage, the researchers reported. The finding, published in Monday's issue of the journal Nature Genetics, opens some interesting questions about human evolution, the team at Iceland's DeCODE Genetics said. "We...

Like many other researchers, paleoanthropologist Timothy Weaver of the University of California, Davis, thought the shift to this more complicated rotational birth predated the split between modern humans and Neandertals. That's because Neandertals, which lived until 30,000 years ago in Europe, also had big heads and, presumably, used the same evolutionary strategy to deliver their big-brained babies. But it has been difficult to test this idea. The only known female pelvis of a Neandertal, discovered in 1929 near Tabun, Israel, is fragmentary. Two earlier reconstructions of this partial pelvis suggested that Neandertals also had rotational birth, but the fossil is...