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Sleep with Neanderthals? Apparently we (homo Sapiens) did By Faye Flam The Philadelphia Inquirer Though it's been 150 years since mysteriously humanlike bones first turned up in Germany's Neander Valley, the find continues to shake our collective sense of human identity. Neanderthals are humanity's closest relatives, with brains at least as big as ours, and yet we don't know whether we should include them as members of our own species. No longer does science consider them our direct ancestors but some suspect Neanderthals and modern homo Sapiens interbred during the 20,000 some-odd years we co-existed in Europe. The archaeological record...

Jan. 27, 2004 — In a prehistoric battle for survival, Neanderthals had to compete against modern humans and were wiped off the face of the Earth, according to a new study on life in Europe from 60,000 to 25,000 years ago. The findings, compiled by 30 scientists, were based on extensive data from sediment cores, archaeological artifacts such as fossils and tools, radiometric dating, and climate models. The collected information was part of a project known as Stage 3, which refers to the time period analyzed. The number three also seems significant in terms of why the Neanderthals became extinct....

Neanderthal DNA Sequencing In July of 1997 the first ever sequencing of Neanderthal DNA was announced in the Jouranl Cell (Krings, et. al., 1997), a breakthrough in the study of modern human evolution. The DNA was extracted for the type specimen and the mitochondrial DNA sequence was determined. This sequence was compared to living human mtDNA sequences and found to be outside the range of variation in modern humans. Age estimation of the Neanderthal and human divergence is four times older than the age of the common mtDNA ancestor of all living humans. The authors suggest that the Neanderthals...

Documentary Redraws Humans' Family Tree Hillary Mayell for National Geographic News January 21, 2003 By analyzing DNA from people in all regions of the world, geneticist Spencer Wells has concluded that all humans alive today are descended from a single man who lived in Africa around 60,000 years ago. Modern humans, he contends, didn't start their spread across the globe until after that time. Most archaeologists would say the exodus began 100,000 years ago—a 40,000-year discrepancy. Wells's take on the origins of modern humans and how they came to populate the rest of the planet is bound to be...

The old lignite skull ANOTHER MYSTERY SKULL... THIS TIME AN ANCIENT EUROPEAN WHICH, SAY FRANCOIS DE SARRE AND MICHEL GRANGER, COULD CHALLENGE THE OFFICIAL VIEW OF HUMAN ORIGINS. 0fficially, the origin of the first true Humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) dates back 2.5 million years. Before this time lived other hominids whose bones cannot be confused with those of Homo's lineage. Against this background, we have the 2oo-year old enigma of an 'impossibly' ancient humanoid skull from the mining town of Freiberg, in Saxony, Germany, which, if verified, could be more than 10 million years old - far older than...