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If the old thread with the same name ever re-surfaces, I'll merge it with this one. Meanwhile, two new papers from different teams have (possibly, since these results are provisional at the moment) very similar things to tell us about how modern non-African humans came to have the particular level of contribution from the Neanderthal genome that we see.

"How Admixture with Neanderthals May Have Affected Human Populations" | Social Evolution Forum/The Evolution Institute (https://evolution-institute.org/blog/how-admixture-with-neanderthals-may-have-affected-human-populations/)

QuoteOne of the most fascinating aspects of the human genome is what it reveals about our enigmatic extinct siblings, the Neanderthals. Two bioRxiv preprints (Harris and Nielsen (http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/10/31/030387), and Juric et al. (http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/10/30/030148)) out just this week have given us new insights into the effects of Neanderthal admixture on ancient Homo sapiens populations, with implications for the phylogenetic relationships between the two hominins. Even though these are still provisional findings, I think they're significant enough to warrant discussion in an evolution forum, and I'm delighted to write my first post here about them.

In case you're not up to date on the latest Neanderthal research, a bit of background is in order. The latest estimates indicate that Neanderthals and humans likely shared a last common ancestor sometime between 550-765 kya. From the sequencing of Neanderthal mitochondrial and nuclear genomes, we've learned that as modern humans spread out of Africa there was subsequent hybridization between human and Neanderthal groups in Europe and Asia resulting in varying degrees (~2-4%) of Neanderthal ancestry among contemporary non-African populations. We have also learned that Neanderthal populations were quite small, maintaining an effective population size of just ~1,000 for about 400,000 years (see reference list at the end of this post for citations and further reading).

How did admixture with Neanderthals affect human populations? Some of the alleles from Neanderthal populations appear to provide an adaptive advantage to non-Africans, particularly those for hair and skin color. However, these are only a tiny fraction of Neanderthal-derived alleles. There are large, conserved swathes of the human genome where Neanderthal ancestry appears to be depleted, implying that there is selection against the majority of Neanderthal-derived functional alleles. But what does this selection mean for our evolutionary history? Was it due to hybrid incompatibility between the Neanderthals and humans? Or were those alleles also deleterious in Neanderthals?

[Continues . . . (https://evolution-institute.org/blog/how-admixture-with-neanderthals-may-have-affected-human-populations/)]

A lot of prior knowledge is needed to completely understand this, and there was one word, introgression, the meaning of which I could only vaguely infer from the context. However, it has become clearer on second reading, and it is fascinating that two approaches have reached similar conclusions. I watch this space in anticipation of further research.

Some good and some not so good from our beetle-browed relatives.

"Neanderthal genes gave modern humans an immunity boost, allergies" | Science Daily (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160107140408.htm)

QuoteWhen modern humans met Neanderthals in Europe and the two species began interbreeding many thousands of years ago, the exchange left humans with gene variations that have increased the ability of those who carry them to ward off infection. This inheritance from Neanderthals may have also left some people more prone to allergies.

The discoveries reported in two independent studies in the American Journal of Human Genetics on January 7 add to evidence for an important role for interspecies relations in human evolution and specifically in the evolution of the innate immune system, which serves as the body's first line of defense against infection.

[Continues . . . (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/01/160107140408.htm)]

What a really interesting read!  Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Quote from: Bluenose on January 08, 2016, 06:12:08 AM
What a really interesting read!  Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

You're welcome, Bluenose.  :)


More about the good and bad that come from Neanderthal genetic contributions: "Our hidden Neandertal DNA may increase risk of allergies, depression" | Science (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/our-hidden-neandertal-dna-may-increase-risk-allergies-depression)

QuoteDepressed? Your inner Neandertal may be to blame. Modern humans met and mated with these archaic people in Europe or Asia about 50,000 years ago, and researchers have long suspected that genes picked up in these trysts might be shaping health and well-being today. Now, a study in the current issue of Science details their impact. It uses a powerful new method for scanning the electronic health records (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6274/737.abstract) of 28,000 Americans to show that some Neandertal gene variants today can raise the risk of depression, skin lesions, blood clots, and other disorders.

Neandertal genes aren't all bad. "These variants sometimes protect against a disease, sometimes make people more susceptible to disease," says paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Two other new studies identified three archaic genes that boost immune response. And most archaic genes that persist in humans were likely beneficial in prehistoric times. But some now cause disease because modern lifestyles and environments are so different.

[Continues . . . (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/our-hidden-neandertal-dna-may-increase-risk-allergies-depression)]

The mixing of early anatomically modern humans (AMH) with Neanderthals means that the genetic contributions went both ways. A paper published online yesterday presents evidence of AMH contribution to a Neanderthal genome. This interbreeding occurred much earlier than any previously discovered.

"Early gene flow from modern humans into Neanderthals" | EurekAlert (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-02/m-egf021616.php)

Quote

(https://www.happyatheistforum.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fmedia.eurekalert.org%2Fmultimedia_prod%2Fpub%2Fweb%2F109096_web.jpg&hash=9cbcd7d4f86476cea24d0863f03814e49b3291ad)

Scenario of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals: Neanderthal DNA in present-day humans outside Africa originates from interbreeding that occurred 47,000 - 65,000 years ago (green arrow). Modern human DNA in Neanderthals is likely a consequence of earlier contact between the two groups roughly 100,000 years ago (red arrow). Image Credit: Ilan Gronau

QuoteUsing several different methods of DNA analysis, an international research team has identified an interbreeding event between Neanderthals and modern humans that occurred an estimated 100,000 years ago, which is tens of thousands of years earlier than other such events previously documented. They suggest that some modern humans left Africa early and mixed with Neanderthals. These modern humans later became extinct and are therefore not among the ancestors of present-day people outside Africa who left Africa about 65,000 years ago.

"We knew from Neanderthal DNA found in the genomes of humans outside Africa that Neanderthals and humans have interbred. This interbreeding is estimated to have happened less than 65,000 years ago, around the time that modern human populations spread across Eurasia from Africa. We now find evidence for a modern human contribution to the Neanderthal genome. This is likely the result of much earlier interbreeding", says Sergi Castellano from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who co-led the study.

[Continues . . . (http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-02/m-egf021616.php)]

The full paper is available for free from Nature: "Ancient gene flow from early modern humans into Eastern Neanderthals" | Nature (http://www.nature.com/articles/nature16544.epdf?referrer_access_token=5Wuzi5UR5VzqPc7ILIo1i9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MInt_2jYvKBG--7sOqWdGTzUvToNHVvyhzE6mZLLgJJk-xwPlVu6cq_cgI4vcmhH2utoks_DbU5ieQAjiolCiOIQT10JeCT708MMEwLfMWgzX42o_FZjPlZvVJ6HFwt9vGcZHNsge40rF9ccnCmr3h)

Another intriguing discovery about Neanderthal genetics comes from the ancient bones found in the Sima de los Huesos ("pit of bones") in Spain, which was mentioned in the previous thread on this topic because of the possible evidence of prehistoric murder (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27611-csi-stone-age-was-430000-year-old-hominin-murdered/) found there.

The abstract of the paper (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature17405.html) in Nature:

QuoteA unique assemblage of 28 hominin individuals, found in Sima de los Huesos in the Sierra de Atapuerca in Spain, has recently been dated to approximately 430,000 years ago. An interesting question is how these Middle Pleistocene hominins were related to those who lived in the Late Pleistocene epoch, in particular to Neanderthals in western Eurasia and to Denisovans, a sister group of Neanderthals so far known only from southern Siberia. While the Sima de los Huesos hominins share some derived morphological features with Neanderthals, the mitochondrial genome retrieved from one individual from Sima de los Huesos is more closely related to the mitochondrial DNA of Denisovans than to that of Neanderthals. However, since the mitochondrial DNA does not reveal the full picture of relationships among populations, we have investigated DNA preservation in several individuals found at Sima de los Huesos. Here we recover nuclear DNA sequences from two specimens, which show that the Sima de los Huesos hominins were related to Neanderthals rather than to Denisovans, indicating that the population divergence between Neanderthals and Denisovans predates 430,000 years ago. A mitochondrial DNA recovered from one of the specimens shares the previously described relationship to Denisovan mitochondrial DNAs, suggesting, among other possibilities, that the mitochondrial DNA gene pool of Neanderthals turned over later in their history.

Press release: "Analysis of nuclear DNA from Sima de los Huesos hominins provides evidence of their relationship to Neanderthals" | ScienceDaily (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160315120946.htm)

QuotePrevious analyses of the hominins from Sima de los Huesos in 2013 showed that their maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA was distantly related to Denisovans, extinct relatives of Neanderthals in Asia. This was unexpected since their skeletal remains carry Neanderthal-derived features. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have since worked on sequencing nuclear DNA from fossils from the cave, a challenging task as the extremely old DNA is degraded to very short fragments. The results now show that the Sima de los Huesos hominins were indeed early Neanderthals. Neanderthals may have acquired different mitochondrial genomes later, perhaps as the result of gene flow from Africa.

Until now it has been unclear how the 28 400,000-year-old individuals found at the Sima de los Huesos ("pit of bones") site in Northern Spain were related to Neanderthals and Denisovans who lived until about 40,000 years ago. A previous report based on analyses of mitochondrial DNA from one of the specimens suggested a distant relationship to Denisovans, which is in contrast to other archaeological evidence, including morphological features that the Sima de los Huesos hominins shared with Neanderthals.

[Continues . . . (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160315120946.htm)]

. . . And an article about this find: "Oldest ever human genome sequence may rewrite human history" | New Scientist (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2080549-oldest-ever-human-genome-sequence-may-rewrite-human-history/)

QuoteThe oldest ever human nuclear DNA to be reconstructed and sequenced reveals Neanderthals in the making – and the need for a possible rewrite of our own origins.

The 430,000-year-old DNA comes from mysterious early human fossils found in Spain's Sima de los Huesos, or "pit of bones".

[. . .]

The results suggest they are more closely related to ancestors of Neanderthals than those of Denisovans – meaning the two groups must have diverged by 430,000 years ago. This is much earlier than the geneticists had expected.

It also alters our own timeline. We know that Denisovans and Neanderthals shared a common ancestor that had split from our modern human lineage. In light of the new nuclear DNA evidence, Meyer's team suggests this split might have happened as early as 765,000 years ago.

[Continues . . . (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2080549-oldest-ever-human-genome-sequence-may-rewrite-human-history/)]

A new study shows that the Y chromosome of Neanderthal appears to have left no trace in anatomically modern humans (AMH). There are a few hypotheses that have been advanced to explain this, including the possibility that there were some genes in their Y chromosome that were incompatible with AMH.

"Missing Y chromosome kept us apart from Neanderthals" | New Scientist (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2083381-missing-y-chromosome-kept-us-apart-from-neanderthals/)

QuoteModern humans diverged from Neanderthals some 600,000 years ago – and a new study shows the Y chromosome might be what kept the two species separate.

It seems we were genetically incompatible with our ancient relatives – and male fetuses conceived through sex with Neanderthal males would have miscarried. We knew that some cross-breeding between us and Neanderthals happened (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2077805-our-first-sex-with-neanderthals-happened-100000-years-ago/) more recently – around 100,000 to 60,000 years ago.

Neanderthal genes have been found in our genomes, on X chromosomes, and have been linked to traits such as skin colour, fertility (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129542-600-neanderthal-human-sex-bred-light-skins-and-infertility/) and even depression and addiction (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2077269-our-neanderthal-genes-linked-to-risk-of-depression-and-addiction/). Now, an analysis of a Y chromosome from a 49,000-year-old male Neanderthal found in El Sidrón, Spain, suggests the chromosome has gone extinct seemingly without leaving any trace in modern humans.

This could simply be because it drifted out of the human gene pool or, as the new study suggests, it could be because genetic differences meant that hybrid offspring who had this chromosome were infertile – a genetic dead end.

[Continues . . . (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2083381-missing-y-chromosome-kept-us-apart-from-neanderthals/)]

The abstract of the paper (http://www.cell.com/ajhg/abstract/S0002-9297(16)30033-7), which is available for free at the link:

QuoteSequencing the genomes of extinct hominids has reshaped our understanding of modern human origins. Here, we analyze ∼120 kb of exome-captured Y-chromosome DNA from a Neandertal individual from El Sidrón, Spain. We investigate its divergence from orthologous chimpanzee and modern human sequences and find strong support for a model that places the Neandertal lineage as an outgroup to modern human Y chromosomes—including A00, the highly divergent basal haplogroup. We estimate that the time to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA) of Neandertal and modern human Y chromosomes is ∼588 thousand years ago (kya) (95% confidence interval [CI]: 447–806 kya). This is ∼2.1 (95% CI: 1.7–2.9) times longer than the TMRCA of A00 and other extant modern human Y-chromosome lineages. This estimate suggests that the Y-chromosome divergence mirrors the population divergence of Neandertals and modern human ancestors, and it refutes alternative scenarios of a relatively recent or super-archaic origin of Neandertal Y chromosomes. The fact that the Neandertal Y we describe has never been observed in modern humans suggests that the lineage is most likely extinct. We identify protein-coding differences between Neandertal and modern human Y chromosomes, including potentially damaging changes to PCDH11Y, TMSB4Y, USP9Y, and KDM5D. Three of these changes are missense mutations in genes that produce male-specific minor histocompatibility (H-Y) antigens. Antigens derived from KDM5D, for example, are thought to elicit a maternal immune response during gestation. It is possible that incompatibilities at one or more of these genes played a role in the reproductive isolation of the two groups.

A new paper describes one of the ways that anatomically modern humans may have been involved in the extinction of Neanderthals: by giving them nasty new bugs.

"Neanderthals may have been infected by diseases carried out of Africa by humans" | Phys.org (http://phys.org/news/2016-04-neanderthals-infected-diseases-africa-humans.html)

QuoteA new study suggests that Neanderthals across Europe may well have been infected with diseases carried out of Africa by waves of anatomically modern humans, or Homo sapiens. As both were species of hominin, it would have been easier for pathogens to jump populations, say researchers. This might have contributed to the demise of Neanderthals.

Researchers from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford Brookes have reviewed the latest evidence gleaned from pathogen genomes and DNA from ancient bones, and concluded that some infectious diseases are likely to be many thousands of years older than previously believed.


[Continues . . . (http://phys.org/news/2016-04-neanderthals-infected-diseases-africa-humans.html)]

A pre-print version of the full paper is available for free: "Neanderthal Genomics Suggests a Pleistocene TimeFrame for the First Epidemiologic Transition" | American Journal of Physical Anthropology (PDF) (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajpa.22985/epdf)

That's how we got rid of Native Americans - with smallpox and other bugs. Effective strategy.

Our robust cousins of old built circles of broken off stalagmites deep inside a cave.

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Image Credit: Ettienne Fabre - SSAC

"Neanderthals built cave structures — and no one knows why" | Nature (http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-built-cave-structures-and-no-one-knows-why-1.19975)

QuoteNeanderthals built one of the world's oldest constructions — 176,000-year-old semicircular walls of stalagmites in the bowels of a cave in southwest France. The walls are currently the best evidence that Neanderthals built substantial structures and ventured deep into caves, but researchers are wary of concluding much more.

"The big question is why they made it," says Jean-Jacques Hublin, a palaeoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany who was not involved in the study, which is published online in Nature on 25 May 1. "Some people will come up with interpretations of ritual or religion or symbolism. Why not? But how to prove it?"

Speleologists first discovered the structures in Bruniquel Cave in the early 1990s. They are located about a third of a kilometre from the cave entrance, through a narrow passage that at one point requires crawling on all fours. Archaeologists later found a burnt bone from an herbivore or cave bear nearby and could detect no radioactive carbon left in it — a sign that the bone was older than 50,000 years, the limit of carbon dating. But when the archaeologist leading the excavation died in 1999, work stopped.

[Continues . . . (http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-built-cave-structures-and-no-one-knows-why-1.19975)]

A new paper presents some fairly strong evidence from a cave in Belgium of cannibalism by Neanderthals.

There is a press release that can be found at ScienceDaily: ("Cannibalism among late Neanderthals in northern Europe" (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160706092806.htm)). That brief article doesn't answer the question that came to my mind--how do we know that it was Neanderthals butchering Neanderthals, and not early anatomically modern humans butchering Neanderthals? The full paper is available for free, however: "Neandertal cannibalism and Neandertal bones used as tools in Northern Europe" | Scientific Reports (http://www.nature.com/articles/srep29005). The authors of the paper say that there is no evidence of anatomically modern humans being in the area of the cave at the time.

A couple of recent stories, neither one of which is particularly solid, but I guess most of you know by now that I have an interest in anything to do with this branch of the family tree:

"Neanderthal skulls and brains may have developed just like ours" | New Scientist (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2098414-neanderthal-skulls-and-brains-may-have-developed-just-like-ours/)

QuoteEvidence from Neanderthals' skulls suggests that their large brains grew in the same way as ours do. That in turn suggests that Neanderthals were perhaps not so cognitively different from us – although not everyone agrees with this interpretation.

We know that Neanderthal brains were roughly the same size as ours (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21328470-400-into-the-mind-of-a-neanderthal/), making them the largest among all known extinct human species. To get a sense for how they grew over an individual's life, Christoph Zollikofer at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and his colleagues looked at 15 Neanderthal skulls. Six belonged to adults and nine to children; the youngest was an individual who died just weeks after birth, the oldest a child who died aged roughly 12.

Using software, they generated 3D casts of the brain case – effectively allowing them to study changes in the rough shape of the Neanderthal brain through childhood. They then compared the findings with patterns of brain development in modern children.

The team found evidence that at birth, Neanderthal brains were subtly but significantly longer, wider and flatter than modern human brains. Subsequently, though, the Neanderthal brain developed rather like ours: certain regions, including the cerebellum, expanded quickly during childhood and then became some of the slowest-growing areas in early adulthood.

[Continues . . . (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2098414-neanderthal-skulls-and-brains-may-have-developed-just-like-ours/)]

Later in the story, we learn that a different study using some of the same specimens produced different results, and so putting too much weight on this later study may not be justified.


For those interested in the development of clothing:

"Ice age fashion showdown: Neanderthal capes versus human hoodies" | New Scientist (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2100322-ice-age-fashion-showdown-neanderthal-capes-versus-human-hoodies/)

QuoteAn analysis of animal remains at prehistoric hominin sites across Europe suggests modern humans clad themselves in snug, fur-trimmed clothing, while Neanderthals probably opted for simple capes.

Even so, the finding suggests our extinct cousin was far more sophisticated than once thought.

[Continues . . . (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2100322-ice-age-fashion-showdown-neanderthal-capes-versus-human-hoodies/)]

There seems to be evidence that schizophrenia appeared in anatomically modern humans after we diverged from the Neandertals.

"Schizophrenia emerged after humans diverged from Neanderthals" | ScienceDaily (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160815064944.htm)

QuoteSchizophrenia poses an evolutionary enigma. The disorder has existed throughout recorded human history and persists despite its severe effects on thought and behavior, and its reduced rates of producing offspring. A new study in Biological Psychiatry may help explain why-comparing genetic information of Neanderthals to modern humans, the researchers found evidence for an association between genetic risk for schizophrenia and markers of human evolution.

"This study suggests that schizophrenia is a modern development, one that emerged after humans diverged from Neanderthals," said John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. "It suggests that early hominids did not have this disorder."

The cause of schizophrenia remains unknown, but researchers know that genetics play a significant role in the development. According to senior author Ole Andreassen from the University of Oslo in Norway and University of California, San Diego, some think that schizophrenia could be a "side effect" of advantageous gene variants related to the acquisition of human traits, like language and complex cognitive skills, that might have increased our propensity to developing psychoses.

[Continues . . . (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160815064944.htm)]

^ Very interesting. :smilenod:

It may be that the Neanderthals' face/skull morphology is more evolved than ours. That is, they diverged further from the possible common ancestor than we did. This makes sense to me, because I think that the environment they lived in (Europe during the most recent Ice Age) created more evolutionary pressure than the one that the population that we are mostly descended from lived in during the same period (northern Africa).

"Your face is probably more primitive than a Neanderthal's | BBC (http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170214-your-face-is-probably-more-primitive-than-a-neanderthals)

QuoteThe question is, when did humans start to look like we do today? New scientific techniques and discoveries are starting to provide answers. But they are also revealing that our distinctive facial features may be far older than many anthropologists originally believed.

[. . .]

"As the last surviving species of humans on the planet, it is tempting to assume our modern faces sit at the tip of our evolutionary branch," says Chris Stringer, an anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, as he joins me in the gallery.

"And for a long time, that has been what the fossils seemed to indicate," he continues. "Around 500,000 years ago, there was a fairly widespread form of Homo heidelbergensis that has a face somewhat intermediate between that of a modern human and Neanderthals. For a long time, I argued this was our common ancestor with Neanderthals."

[. . .]

For decades, most anthropologists agreed that Neanderthals had retained many of these features from H. heidelbergensis as they evolved and developed a more protruding jaw, while our own species went in a different direction. That was until the 1990s, when a puzzling discovery was unearthed in the Sierra de Atapuerca region of northern Spain.

In a sinkhole in the mountains, fragments of a small, flat-faced skull were unearthed, alongside several other bones. The remains were identified as belonging to a previously unknown species of hominin. It was called Homo antecessor (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/276/5317/1392).

At first, this apparent contradiction was hand-waved away. The Atapuerca skull belonged to a child, aged around 10 to 12 years old. It is difficult to predict what this youngster's face would have looked like in adulthood, because as humans age their skulls grow and change shape. "It was assumed that it would fill out and grow into something resembling heidelbergensis," says Stringer.

However, later discoveries (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248408000754) suggest this is not the case. "We now have four fragments from antecessor adult and sub-adult skulls," says Stringer. "It looks like they maintain the morphology we see in the child's skull."

The face of this new species of human ancestor appeared to be far more like our own, and even had the distinctive hollowing of the canine fossa. Yet it lived 850,000 years ago, well before H. heidelbergensis.

[. . .]

[Jean-Jaques] Hublin [of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology] thinks that modern humans have retained a lot of primitive features from our distant ancestors. "It seems the Neanderthals are more evolved in their own direction than modern humans," he says. "They would have looked very peculiar to our eyes."

In other words, the faces of modern humans may not be all that modern at all.

[Continues . . . (http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170214-your-face-is-probably-more-primitive-than-a-neanderthals)]

Interesting. It's generally thought that modern human's facial characteristics evolved through neoteny (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoteny_in_humans).

I was wondering about the Mongoloid adaptations to cold weather: the smaller ears and nose compared with, say, the Caucasian group, plus the "slitted" eyes and the protective aspects of the epicanthic fold.

If the large nose of the Neanderthal is, IIRC, to help warm incoming air. This seems contrary, unless the windchill factor was more important in the colder parts of Asia than Europe (keep forgetting just how cold it gets in Japan and N. Korea, let alone Mongolia itself and high in the Asian mountains.)

Caucasians seem to fall between Negroid and Mongolian in some respects of head morphology, especially the nose?

Whatever works will survive! Could be more than one solution to a problem.

I'm wondering about this too now. :lol:

Especially considering the mongoloid nose is flatter than Caucasians, in general. I don't know if their turbinates are the same. :notsure:

There could be other mechanisms at work, such as sexual selection, but I don't know.  Just thinking aloud.

Quote from: xSilverPhinx on February 20, 2017, 09:58:11 PM
I'm wondering about this too now. :lol:

Especially considering the mongoloid nose is flatter than Caucasians, in general. I don't know if their turbinates are the same. :notsure:

There could be other mechanisms at work, such as sexual selection, but I don't know.  Just thinking aloud.

The more prominent the features the more prone they are to frostbite, especially in windy conditions.

I indulged in speculation in my intro to the BBC piece. The changes in Neanderthals' skull morphology may have had little to do with evolutionary pressure from their environment. Maybe it was sexual selection, or maybe the genes that changed to produce the different morphology conferred some advantage not directly related to the morphology. It's also possible that the change was due to nothing more than genetic drift (http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrary/article/evo_24). I've looked around, and it appears that as yet there's no scientific consensus regarding this issue.

Seems Neanderthal noses are a subject of some speculation.

QuoteThe Neanderthal's huge nose is a fluke of evolution, not some grand adaptation, research suggests.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn15042-why-did-neanderthals-have-such-big-noses/

The continuing contribution of Neanderthals to the way the genes of non-African population are expressed is described in a new paper: "Neanderthal DNA contributes to human gene expression" | PHYS.ORG (https://phys.org/news/2017-02-neanderthal-dna-contributes-human-gene.html)

QuoteThe last Neanderthal died 40,000 years ago, but much of their genome lives on, in bits and pieces, through modern humans. The impact of Neanderthals' genetic contribution has been uncertain: Do these snippets affect our genome's function, or are they just silent passengers along for the ride? In Cell on February 23, researchers report evidence that Neanderthal DNA sequences still influence how genes are turned on or off in modern humans. Neanderthal genes' effects on gene expression likely contribute to traits such as height and susceptibility to schizophrenia or lupus, the researchers found.

"Even 50,000 years after the last human-Neanderthal mating, we can still see measurable impacts on gene expression," says geneticist and study co-author Joshua Akey of the University of Washington School of Medicine. "And those variations in gene expression contribute to human phenotypic variation and disease susceptibility."


[Continues . . . (https://phys.org/news/2017-02-neanderthal-dna-contributes-human-gene.html)]

The full paper is available for free: "Impacts of Neanderthal-Introgressed Sequences on the Landscape of Human Gene Expression" | Cell (http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)30128-9)

Summary from the paper:

QuoteRegulatory variation influencing gene expression is a key contributor to phenotypic diversity, both within and between species. Unfortunately, RNA degrades too rapidly to be recovered from fossil remains, limiting functional genomic insights about our extinct hominin relatives. Many Neanderthal sequences survive in modern humans due to ancient hybridization, providing an opportunity to assess their contributions to transcriptional variation and to test hypotheses about regulatory evolution. We developed a flexible Bayesian statistical approach to quantify allele-specific expression (ASE) in complex RNA-seq datasets. We identified widespread expression differences between Neanderthal and modern human alleles, indicating pervasive cis-regulatory impacts of introgression. Brain regions and testes exhibited significant downregulation of Neanderthal alleles relative to other tissues, consistent with natural selection influencing the tissue-specific regulatory landscape. Our study demonstrates that Neanderthal-inherited sequences are not silent remnants of ancient interbreeding but have measurable impacts on gene expression that contribute to variation in modern human phenotypes.

Let's not forget the "prestigious man" phenomenon.  http://www.iflscience.com/health-and-medicine/least-ten-other-men-are-fruitful-genghis-khan/    Guys like Genghis Khan have lots of children with lots of women, so they leave lots of genes in the gene pool.  Their characteristics get carried on just because they were prestigious men in their times.  So maybe there was a Neanderthal ruler who happened to have a big nose, and his genes ended up in his children and children's children because of his position.

Maybe.

QuoteA cave in northern Spain that previously yielded evidence of Neanderthals as brain-eating cannibals now suggests the prehistoric humans ate their greens and used herbal remedies.

A new study of skeletal remains from El Sidrón cave site in Asturias (map) detected chemical and food traces on the teeth of five Neanderthals

QuoteThe cave dwellers' diet was found to include yarrow and chamomile, both bitter-tasting plants with little nutritional value. Earlier research by the same team had shown that the Neanderthals in El Sidrón had a gene for tasting bitter substances.

"We know that Neanderthals would find these plants bitter, so it is likely these plants must have been selected for reasons other than taste"—probably medication, Hardy said in a statement.

"It fits in well with the behavioral pattern of self-medication by today's higher primates, and indeed many other animals."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/07/120720-neanderthals-herbs-humans-medicine-science/#close

This story has a number of different aspects to it. I was going to add a post to the "Neanderthals in the News" thread, but will put it here.  :)

"Neanderthals may have medicated with penicillin and painkillers" | New Scientist (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2123669-neanderthals-may-have-medicated-with-penicillin-and-painkillers/)

QuoteWhat a difference 1000 kilometres make. Neanderthals living in prehistoric Belgium enjoyed their meat – but the Neanderthals who lived in what is now northern Spain seem to have survived on an almost exclusively vegetarian diet.

This is according to new DNA analysis that also suggests sick Neanderthals could self-medicate with naturally occurring painkillers and antibiotics, and that they shared mouth microbiomes with humans – perhaps exchanged by kissing.

Neanderthals didn't clean their teeth particularly well – which is lucky for scientific investigators. Over time, plaque built up into a hard substance called dental calculus, which still clings to the ancient teeth even after tens of thousands of years.

Researchers have already identified tiny food fragments in ancient dental calculus to get an insight into the diets of prehistoric hominins (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21982-eats-bark-fruit-and-leaves-diet-of-ancient-human/). Now Laura Weyrich at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and her colleagues have shown that dental calculus also carries ancient DNA that can reveal both what Neanderthals ate and which bacteria lived in their mouths.

[Continues . . . (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2123669-neanderthals-may-have-medicated-with-penicillin-and-painkillers/)]

"Some Neanderthals Were Vegetarian — And They Likely Kissed Our Human Ancestors" | NPR (http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/08/519048010/some-neanderthals-were-vegetarian-and-they-likely-kissed-our-human-ancestors)

QuoteLuckily for researchers, there is an abundance of Neanderthal teeth in the fossil record. "We have complete jaws with teeth, we have upper jaws with skulls with teeth intact, isolated teeth," says Keith Dobney, an archaeologist at the University of Liverpool.

He and his colleagues have been studying Neanderthal dental plaques — or rather, the hardened version of plaque, tartar, or what scientists call dental calculus. They scraped off some of the calculus and analyzed the DNA that was preserved in it for clues to what the Neanderthals ate.

They looked at plaques from the teeth of three Neanderthals living in Europe about 50,000 years ago. One individual was from a cave in Spy, Belgium, and the other two were from El Sidrón cave in Spain.

As they report in a study published in this week's Nature, the Belgian individual ate mostly meat. "We found evidence of woolly rhino. We found the DNA of wild sheep," says Dobney.

The researchers also found evidence of mushrooms, but this was certainly a meat lover. This isn't that surprising to scientists who study Neanderthal diets. After all, the butchered bones of woolly rhinos, mammoths, horses and reindeer had been found in the Spy cave and other sites, suggesting a meat-heavy diet.

There had also been other indirect sources of evidence of carnivory, like high levels of a certain nitrogen isotopes, which suggested meat- and/or mushroom-heavy diets.

"Most Neanderthals that had been analyzed [before] were really heavy meat eaters," says Laura Weyrich, at the Australian Center for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide, Australia, and the lead author on the new study. She says those previous studies had suggested that "Neanderthals were as carnivorous as polar bears."

And this is where the new study offered a big surprise. According to the DNA in dental plaques, the Neanderthals in Spain ate no meat at all.

"We find things like pine nuts, moss, tree barks and even mushrooms as well," says Weyrich. "It is very indicative of a vegetarian diet, probably the true Paleo diet." (Not all of the region's Neanderthals were necessarily vegetarians: The El Sidrón cave also contained grisly evidence of cannibalism.)

She says the difference in diets reflects the fact that the two groups lived in two very different environments.

[Continues . . . (http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/08/519048010/some-neanderthals-were-vegetarian-and-they-likely-kissed-our-human-ancestors)]

If you go to the NPR article and click on the link to the original paper (where "a study" is bolded in my quote) you can get access to the full paper via an automatic redirect. I can't link directly to it from here.

 Oops, missed the "Neanderthals in the news" thread or I would have puut it there.

Stuck this in there if you wish, Recusant.

Not a science story, but interesting none the less, in my opinion.  ;)

An interview with Claire Cameron, the author of The Last Neanderthal (http://www.claire-cameron.com/books/the-last-neanderthal/):

"The new Neanderthals" | Maclean's (http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-new-neanderthals/)

Quote

(https://www.happyatheistforum.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F04%2FMAC04_NEANDERTHAL_POST02-2.jpg&hash=d572bcc1fb95b87ee8537983e078b8183438d1fe)
'Nana & Flint' are forensic reconstructions of the Gibraltar 1 (Forbes' Quarry, 1848) and
Gibraltar 2 (Devil's Tower Shelter Cave, 1926) Neanderthal fossils by Dutch artists Kennis & Kennis.
Image Credit: S. Finlayson

Toronto novelist Claire Cameron, whose 2014 bestseller The Bear took place in the contemporary Canadian wilderness, moves across time and space to an equally dangerous locale for The Last Neanderthal, set in France 40,000 years ago. The intricate tale of Girl, the title character, and Rose, the modern-day archaeologist who discovers her bones, is a story of common humanity, including the fact that the more things change for pregnant women, the more they stay the same. The novel is also thoroughly immersed in the recent explosion in knowledge—and speculation—about our closest kin. Cameron spoke with Maclean's about the lives and fate of the Neanderthals.

Q: You note that Neanderthal—"stooped over, hairy, primitive, dull"—is still an insult in use, but our cousins have been picking up a lot of good press lately. Why are we so fascinated?

A: Since 2010, yes, and the first draft of the genome. That really changed the perception. They're almost like a Shakespearean foil now. We can see ourselves in them.

Q: And we did see them, literally. That makes a difference.

A: It's the interbreeding between the two groups that really takes it up a notch: between one and four per cent of European and Asian DNA is Neanderthal.

Q: So, as usual, it's all about us. What did we get out of this genome infusion? Red hair, which Girl has, has caught the popular imagination.

A: We are a self-centred storytelling species, aren't we? Yes, there's the red hair, though that comes from a small sample. Scientists are starting to look into things like immunity. For genes to stick around, they do need to play some sort of role often—not always—but there are all sorts of things in the news at the moment about what and why.

[Continues . . . (http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/the-new-neanderthals/)]

It looks like there's a new way to investigate the history of our ancestors.

"Long After Their Bones Were Gone, Neanderthals' DNA Survived in a Cave" | Live Science (http://www.livescience.com/58872-neanderthal-dna-found-in-ancient-cave-mud.html)

QuoteDNA from two extinct human relatives — the Neanderthals, and a mysterious branch of humanity called the Denisovans — has been detected in the ancient mud of caves, even though those caves hold no fossils of those individuals, new research shows.

The finding suggests that scientists could detect such extinct lineages in places devoid of skeletal remains, the researchers said. This technique, if verified, could fill blank spots in scientists' understanding of how and where humans evolved, according to the authors of the new study describing the finding.

[Continues . . . (http://www.livescience.com/58872-neanderthal-dna-found-in-ancient-cave-mud.html)]

Differences and similarities in the ways that Neanderthals grew and anatomically modern humans grow are explored in a new study:

"Reconstructing how Neanderthals grew, based on an El Sidrón child" | ScienceDaily (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170921141215.htm)

QuoteHow did Neanderthals grow? Does modern man develop in the same way as Homo neanderthalensis did? How does the size of the brain affect the development of the body? Researchers have studied the fossil remains of a Neanderthal child's skeleton in order to establish whether there are differences between the growth of Neanderthals and that of sapiens.

According to the results of the article, which are published in Science, both species regulate their growth differently to adapt their energy consumption to their physical characteristics.

"Discerning the differences and similarities in growth patterns between Neanderthals and modern humans helps us better define our own history. Modern humans and Neanderthals emerged from a common recent ancestor, and this is manifested in a similar overall growth rate," explains CSIC researcher, Antonio Rosas, from Spain's National Natural Science Museum (MNCN). As fellow CSIC researcher Luis Ríos highlights, "Applying paediatric growth assessment methods, this Neanderthal child is no different to a modern-day child." The pattern of vertebral maturation and brain growth, as well as energy constraints during development, may have marked the anatomical shape of Neanderthals.

Neanderthals had a greater cranial capacity than today's humans. Neanderthal adults had an intracranial volume of 1,520 cubic centimetres, while that of modern adult man is 1,195 cubic centimetres. That of the Neanderthal child in the study had reached 1,330 cubic centimetres at the time of his death, in other words, 87.5% of the total reached at eight years of age. At that age, the development of a modern-day child's cranial capacity has already been fully completed.

"Developing a large brain involves significant energy expenditure and, consequently, this hinders the growth of other parts of the body. In sapiens, the development of the brain during childhood has a high energetic cost and, as a result, the development of the rest of the body slows down," Rosas explains.

[Continues . . . (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/09/170921141215.htm)]

There are a couple of new papers about newly sequenced Neanderthal genes.

"New Clues to How Neanderthal Genes Affect Your Health" | National Geographic (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/how-neanderthal-genes-affect-human-health-dna-science/)

Quote

(https://www.happyatheistforum.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.nationalgeographic.com%2Fcontent%2Fdam%2Fnews%2F2017%2F10%2F04%2Fneanderthal-genes%2F01-neanderthal-genes.adapt.590.1.jpg&hash=9f24c31af89d0bba2af963276a33df375e4fe130)
This reconstruction of a Neanderthal female unveiled in 2008
was the first made using ancient DNA evidence.
Image credit: Joe McNally

If your arthritis is bad today or you're slathering on aloe for an early autumn sunburn, Neanderthals may be partly to blame.

Scientists announced today the second complete, high-quality sequencing of a Neanderthal genome, made using the 52,000-year-old bones of a female found in the Vindija cave in Croatia.

Together with the genomes from another Neanderthal woman and a host of modern humans, a suite of analyses is yielding new clues about how DNA from Neanderthals contributed to our genetic makeup and might still be affecting us today.

For instance, one new study appearing in the journal Science (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/10/04/science.aao1887) [full paper available with a free AAAS account] suggests that Neanderthal genes contribute 1.8 to 2.6 percent of the total genetic makeup for people of Eurasian ancestry. . . .

But don't go blaming Neanderthals for all your medical woes, cautions study leader Kay Prüfer at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. After all, hundreds if not thousands of factors influence gene expression.

"These are just associations, so that doesn't mean if you have a particular variant of a gene, you either will or won't have a disease. It means sometimes you might," Prüfer says.

What's more, some of the Neanderthal contributions are potentially helpful.

"When we looked, there was one variant that was more certain, for LDL cholesterol, and the gene the Vindija individual carried is protective," Prüfer says. Low-density lipoprotein, commonly called "bad" cholesterol, is associated with fatty buildups in arteries, so genetic protections would help guard against issues such as heart disease.

"A common misconception is the things that come from Neanderthals are generally bad," Prüfer says, "but that's not entirely true."

[. . .]

In a separate study released today in the American Journal of Human Genetics (http://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(17)30379-8), two of Prüfer's colleagues, Michael Dannemann and Janet Kelso, took a slightly different tack. Rather than look at disease-related genes, they looked at how ancient genes might account for physical appearance and even some behaviors.

This team compared the Altai Neanderthal's genes with genetic and—for the first time—physiological data from 112,000 individuals of northern European descent who contributed their information to the UK Biobank.

Dannemann and Kelso found 15 regions in the Altai Neanderthal genome that frequently overlap with sections of the Biobank group's genomes. These genes determine hair and eye color, how badly you sunburn, and even sleep time preference, or whether you're a morning person or a night owl.

Again, just having the gene isn't a guarantee for anything—the Neanderthal genes are just as likely as modern genes to have an effect. But it's intriguing to know that they remain firmly lodged in our makeup.

Dannemann says he and Kelso plan on repeating the research using the new Vindija genome and an expanded Biobank cohort of 500,000 people, hoping to reveal even more hidden associations.

[Continues . . . (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/how-neanderthal-genes-affect-human-health-dna-science/)]

A briefer but altogether less satisfactory pop-science article about the Dannemann, Kelso paper is available here (https://phys.org/news/2017-10-neanderthals-didnt-red-hair.html).

I've read discussions of supposed differences between Neanderthal and anatomically modern humans (AMH) in which it was asserted that since Neanderthals didn't create recognizable art, they must have thought differently than AMH, including a lack of symbolic thought. Those who believe that might have been too hasty.

"Neanderthals were artistic like modern humans" | ScienceDaily (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180222144943.htm)

QuoteScientists have found the first major evidence that Neanderthals, rather than modern humans, created the world's oldest known cave paintings -- suggesting they may have had an artistic sense similar to our own.

A new study led by the University of Southampton and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology shows that paintings in three caves in Spain were created more than 64,000 years ago -- 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe.

This means that the Palaeolithic (Ice Age) cave art -- including pictures of animals, dots and geometric signs -- must have been made by Neanderthals, a 'sister' species to Homo sapiens, and Europe's sole human inhabitants at the time.

It also indicates that they thought symbolically, like modern humans.

Published today in the journal Science, the study reveals how an international team of scientists used a state-of-the-art technique called uranium-thorium dating to fix the age of the paintings as more than 64,000 years.

[Continues . . . (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180222144943.htm)]

Yes, heard this on the radio. The old inage of the "noble ssvage" is still being chipped away!

I remember the series where a TV presenter was made up to look like a Neanderthal, except for the obviously different sketetal proportions, and when dressed in a suit got no back-looks stares or comments in crowded streets. He was just a shortish, heavy set man with, er, rugged features. This also supports the idea that they were not that much less intelligent than the average HS.

In the version I heard it was mainly the dots, geogemetrical patterns and hand stencils that had been attributed to them. In the back of my copy of "Secrets of the Ice Age" (cringe) (Evan Hadingham, 1979 (bought by me in 1982)), I found a note that I had made on an index card, "Chronicle, BBC2, 19/4/89: Geometric forms and shapes, spots etc in prehistoric (and later) art may be entopic images created within the nervous system during trance or states of altered conciousness. Entopic vision in these states are common to all races of man, including prehistoric man."

I think the use of, er, ceremonial substances goes back a long way!

There are various geological and environmental time lines, stats of image types, similarity links etc in that book. A quick scan seems to indicate that at the time of writing all images were thought to be of the younger, <40ky, vintage. But pigment analysis and other techniques would have been in their infancy then. The book mentions La Pasiega with Altamira and Castillo and their animal paintings but offers no dates.

Later:

QuoteNew Analysis Reveals Neanderthal Drug Use (http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/plaque-reveals-what-neanderthals-had-for-dinner-and-how-they-used-aspirin/)

Though this mainly refers to medicinal uses betcha they found recreational herbs as well!

It's possible that Neanderthals did some exploration via watercraft (likely using rafts, I'd think).

"Neandertals, Stone Age people may have voyaged the Mediterranean" Science (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/neandertals-stone-age-people-may-have-voyaged-mediterranean)

QuoteOdysseus, who voyaged across the wine-dark seas of the Mediterranean in Homer's epic, may have had some astonishingly ancient forerunners. A decade ago, when excavators claimed to have found stone tools on the Greek island of Crete dating back at least 130,000 years, other archaeologists were stunned—and skeptical. But since then, at that site and others, researchers have quietly built up a convincing case for Stone Age seafarers—and for the even more remarkable possibility that they were Neandertals, the extinct cousins of modern humans.

The finds strongly suggest that the urge to go to sea, and the cognitive and technological means to do so, predates modern humans, says Alan Simmons, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas who gave an overview of recent finds at a meeting here last week of the Society for American Archaeology. "The orthodoxy until pretty recently was that you don't have seafarers until the early Bronze Age," adds archaeologist John Cherry of Brown University, an initial skeptic. "Now we are talking about seafaring Neandertals. It's a pretty stunning change."

[. . .]

[R]ecent evidence from the Mediterranean suggests purposeful navigation. Archaeologists had long noted ancient-looking stone tools on several Mediterranean islands including Crete, which has been an island for more than 5 million years, but they were dismissed as oddities.

Then in 2008 and 2009, Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island co-led a Greek-U.S. team with archaeologist Curtis Runnels of Boston University and discovered hundreds of stone tools near the southern coastal village of Plakias. The picks, cleavers, scrapers, and bifaces were so plentiful that a one-off accidental stranding seems unlikely, Strasser says. The tools also offered a clue to the identity of the early seafarers: The artifacts resemble Acheulean tools developed more than a million years ago by H. erectus and used until about 130,000 years ago by Neandertals as well.

Strasser argued that the tools may represent a sea-borne migration of Neandertals from the Near East to Europe. The team used a variety of techniques to date the soil around the tools to at least 130,000 years old, but they could not pinpoint a more exact date. And the stratigraphy at the site is unclear, raising questions about whether the artifacts are as old as the soil they were embedded in. So other archaeologists were skeptical.

But the surprise discovery prompted researchers to scour the region for additional  sites, an effort that is now bearing fruit. Possible Neandertal artifacts have turned up on a number of islands, including at Stelida on the island of Naxos. Naxos sits 250 kilometers north of Crete in the Aegean Sea; even during glacial times, when sea levels were lower, it was likely accessible only by watercraft.

[Continues . . . (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/neandertals-stone-age-people-may-have-voyaged-mediterranean)]

It's kind of exciting to see all this new stuff about neanderthals, because when I was a kid, they were just another species that we were related to. I remember people talking about them like they were just dumb but strong. This new stuff destroys my bad conceptions of them and that's awesome.

Quote from: Davin on May 01, 2018, 03:43:36 PM
It's kind of exciting to see all this new stuff about neanderthals, because when I was a kid, they were just another species that we were related to. I remember people talking about them like they were just dumb but strong. This new stuff destroys my bad conceptions of them and that's awesome.

That more or less applied to me too.

Seems this story goes back to at least 2012

QuoteThe stone "mousterian" tools are unique to Neanderthals and have been found on the islands of Zakynthos, Lefkada and Kefalonia, which range from five to twelve kilometers from mainland Greece. Some, such as Paul Pettitt from the University of Sheffield, suggest they could have swum that far. But that doesn't explain how similar tools found on the island of Crete got there. That would have meant swimming forty kilometers, which seems extremely unlikely, especially since such swimmers wouldn't have known beforehand that Crete was there to find.

https://phys.org/news/2012-03-evidence-neanderthals-boats-modern-humans.html

Though this does leave a question in my mind about how fsr the could see from and moutain tops on the other islands. It also reopens the wuestion in my mind about how ancient maribers navigated. The Polynesians may have used stars to get back home after being blown, by a storm, to a previously unknown island to let others know it existed. How far did Neanderthal atronomy go one wonders? What other methods could they have used?

Thanks for that link, Dave. Ties in nicely with the story above!


About 40,000 years too late, little treats for Neanderthal zombies:

"Scientists to grow 'mini-brains' using Neanderthal DNA" | The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/may/11/scientists-to-grow-mini-brains-using-neanderthal-dna)

QuoteScientists are preparing to create "miniature brains" that have been genetically engineered to contain Neanderthal DNA, in an unprecedented attempt to understand how humans differ from our closest relatives.

In the next few months the small blobs of tissue, known as brain organoids, will be grown from human stem cells that have been edited to contain "Neanderthalised" versions of several genes.

The lentil-sized organoids, which are incapable of thoughts or feelings, replicate some of the basic structures of an adult brain. They could demonstrate for the first time if there were meaningful differences between human and Neanderthal brain biology.

"Neanderthals are the closest relatives to everyday humans, so if we should define ourselves as a group or a species it is really them that we should compare ourselves to," said Prof Svante Pääbo, director of the genetics department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where the experiments are being performed.

Pääbo previously led the successful international effort to crack the Neanderthal genome, and his lab is now focused on bringing Neanderthal traits back to life in the laboratory through sophisticated gene-editing techniques.

The lab has already inserted Neanderthal genes for craniofacial development into mice (heavy-browed rodents are not anticipated), and Neanderthal pain perception genes into frogs' eggs, which could hint at whether they had a different pain threshold to humans. Now the lab is turning its attention to the brain.

"We're seeing if we can find basic differences in how nerve cells function that may be a basis for why humans seem to be cognitively so special," said Pääbo.

The research comes as the longstanding stereotype of Neanderthals as gormless and thuggish is being rewritten by emerging evidence that they buried their dead, produced cave art and had brains that were larger than our own.

[Continues . . . (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/may/11/scientists-to-grow-mini-brains-using-neanderthal-dna)]

Pääbo's work seems a little reminiscent of the stereotypical mad scientist, so two silly horror movie tropes in one post.  :lol:

^

I liked the comment about "hesvy browed ridrnts"!

There was a bloke on the bus this week, short legs, long arms, heavy brown ridges and a sloping cranium. 

I did wonder . . . But his nose was quite small.

It is already well established that Neanderthals used fire (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160601083926.htm). A new paper describes a combination of experimental archaeology and microscopic examination of ancient hand axes used by a team of scientists lead by Andrew Sorensen; it is proposed that Neanderthals also regularly kindled their own fires.

"The Mystery of How Neanderthals Got Fire" | The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/565514/)

QuoteThe first step to re-creating 50,000-year-old technology is to collect a bunch of rocks. So began Andrew Sorensen's plan to study a great mystery in archaeology: how Neanderthals controlled fire.

Sorensen, an archeologist at Leiden University, collected a special kind of rock called flint off the beaches of England. If you hit it in just the right ways, flint will break to expose sharp edges that can be used to butcher meat, scrape hides, and cut wood. And if you strike it against a mineral called pyrite, sparks will fly. Flint plus pyrite plus tinder equals fire.

Archeologists have found evidence of Neanderthal fire pits. They have even found tar that Neanderthals likely made by deliberately heating birch bark. What they have never found are tools that Neanderthals could have used to start fires on demand. Without it, Neanderthals would have needed to collect fire from natural sources such as lightning strikes, which would have required walking long distances to find fuel to keep fires going and enduring cold spells with raw food when they went out. The mastery of fire would have made life much easier. Many think it was a key turning point in human evolution.

Sorensen suspected that flint tools called bifaces may hold the answer. Bifaces are essentially hand axes used in all sorts of cutting—a "Neanderthal Swiss army knife," as Sorensen put it. So he took a bunch of flint home, shaped it into bifaces, and tried to create fires in an indoor lab. Through trial and error, he found that striking pyrite against the flat side of the biface produced sparks that could ignite tinder. "I wasn't setting off any fire alarms or anything," he says. He extinguished the tinder instead of blowing on it and feeding it progressively larger pieces of fuel.

Now Sorensen had a hypothesis to test. When he repeatedly struck the pyrite against the bifaces, the scraping left marks on the rocks. If Neanderthals did this, presumably their pyrite left marks on their bifaces, too. So he and his co-authors went looking for Neanderthal bifaces in museums to study marks called microwear. In a new paper in Scientific Reports, Sorensen and his co-authors suggest that Neanderthals used bifaces and pyrite to start fires, based on the similar microwear patterns on real Neanderthal stone tools and on the tools he re-created in a lab. Sarah Hlubik, an anthropologist at Rutgers University who also studies the early origins of fire and was not involved in the study, says the paper is "really exciting." It's the first physical evidence of Neanderthals starting fires.

[Continues . . . (https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/565514/)]

The full paper is available for free:

"Neandertal fire-making technology inferred from microwear analysis" | Scientific Reports (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28342-9)

QuoteAbstract:

Fire use appears to have been relatively common among Neandertals in the Middle Palaeolithic. However, the means by which Neandertals procured their fire—either through the collection of natural fire, or by producing it themselves using tools—is still a matter of debate. We present here the first direct artefactual evidence for regular, systematic fire production by Neandertals. From archaeological layers attributed to late Mousterian industries at multiple sites throughout France, primarily to the Mousterian of Acheulean Tradition (MTA) technoculture (ca. 50,000 years BP), we identify using microwear analysis dozens of late Middle Palaeolithic bifacial tools that exhibit macroscopic and microscopic traces suggesting repeated percussion and/or forceful abrasion with a hard mineral material. Both the locations and nature of the polish and associated striations are comparable to those obtained experimentally by obliquely percussing fragments of pyrite (FeS2) against the flat/convex sides of a biface to make fire. The striations within these discrete use zones are always oriented roughly parallel to the longitudinal axis of the tool, allowing us to rule out taphonomic origins for these traces. We therefore suggest that the occasional use of bifaces as 'strike-a-lights' was a technocultural feature shared among the late Neandertals in France.

This one could go in the "Cousins" thread (http://www.happyatheistforum.com/forum/index.php?topic=14107.0) but, slighting the patriarchy, I'm putting it here.  ;)

"Hybrid Hominin: This Girl's Mother and Father Came From Two Different Species" | Discover (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/08/22/neanderthal-denisovan-interbreeding-hybrid-species/)

QuoteHumans think of themselves as exceptional among the creatures inhabiting Earth. But it wasn't always so.

Multiple groups of humans once co-existed with Homo sapiens, including Neanderthals and the mysterious Denisovans (http://discovermagazine.com/2016/dec/meet-the-denisovans). And we did more than simply live alongside them — traces in our DNA reveal that our ancestors also interbred with other human species (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/deadthings/2018/03/15/interbreeding-denisovans/#.W32zis4zpdh).

Now, for the first time, researchers have found direct evidence of this interbreeding in the form of a 13-year-old girl from Russia's Altai Mountains. Her mother was a Neanderthal and her father was a Denisovan, making her a first-generation hybrid of human species.

Researchers from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and elsewhere uncovered the unique specimen among a trove of bones excavated from Denisova Cave in Siberia. The cave is the only place where archaeologists have found bones belonging to the Denisovans, a species of ancient human who we still know very little about. Thousands of bones have been retrieved from the cave since digging began on 2005, yet many remain unanalyzed. Researchers are working through the backlog now to uncover more information about those who inhabited the cave over the course of tens of thousands of years.

One of those cave inhabitants was a girl who died around the age of 13 more than 50,000 years ago. Today, we know her from just a fragment of one of her long bones, a specimen called "Denisova 11." Researchers at Max Planck extracted samples from the bone to retrieve genetic information. Their first attempt pegged her as being pure Neanderthal, based on data from her mitchondrial DNA, inherited only from the mother. But the sample was so well-preserved, they decided to conduct more in-depth tests of her whole genome.

"And we were very surprised when the data started coming in to see that it was actually equally close to both Neanderthals and Denisovans," says Svante Pääbo, a co-author of the paper and director of the department of genetics at Max Planck. "I thought they had screwed up something."

But, as they dug further, they found that the girl, let's call her "11" for short, truly did have equal amounts of both Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA.

"You can see that in each chromosome pair, one of the partners comes exclusively from the Neanderthal and the other from something that's exclusively Denisovan," Pääbo says.

And, because all of the genes passed on through mitochondrial DNA were Neanderthal, 11's mother must have belonged to that species, making her father a Denisovan.

[. . .]

Digging further into 11's genome, the researchers found that her Denisovan father also possessed Neanderthal traits, indicating that he too could count a Neanderthal in his family tree. It's hard evidence that interbreeding occurred on at least two occasions, packed into a single find. Her mother's genetic history yielded insights as well — she turned out to be more closely related to Neanderthals living in Western Europe than to another Neanderthal found at Denisova cave.

[Continues . . . (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2018/08/22/neanderthal-denisovan-interbreeding-hybrid-species/)]

I expect that what we think of as the human spine predates anatomically modern humans, given that our ancestors were walking upright millions of years before we arrived on the scene. Anyway, Neanderthals used the same spinal geometry, apparently.

"Neanderthals walked upright just like the humans of today" | ScienceDaily (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190225170236.htm)

QuoteNeanderthals are often depicted as having straight spines and poor posture. However, these prehistoric humans were more similar to us than many assume. University of Zurich researchers have shown that Neanderthals walked upright just like modern humans -- thanks to a virtual reconstruction of the pelvis and spine of a very well-preserved Neanderthal skeleton found in France.

An upright, well-balanced posture is one of the defining features of Homo sapiens. In contrast, the first reconstructions of Neanderthals made in the early 20th century depicted them as only walking partially upright. These reconstructions were based on the largely preserved skeleton of an elderly male Neanderthal unearthed in La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France.

Changing perspectives

Since the 1950s, scientists have known that the image of the Neanderthal as a hunched over caveman is not an accurate one. Their similarities to ourselves -- both in evolutionary and behavioral terms -- have also long been known, but in recent years the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. "Focusing on the differences is back in fashion," says Martin Haeusler, UZH specialist in evolutionary medicine. For instance, recent studies have used a few isolated vertebrae to conclude that Neanderthals did not yet possess a well-developed double S-shaped spine.

However, a virtual reconstruction of the skeleton from La Chapelle-aux-Saints has now delivered evidence to the contrary. This computer-generated anatomical model was created by the research group led by Martin Haeusler from the University of Zurich and included Erik Trinkaus from Washington University in St. Louis. The researchers were able to show that both the individual in question as well as Neanderthals in general had a curved lumbar region and neck -- just like the humans of today.

[Continues . . . (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190225170236.htm)]

Not really news, since I think those who study them would say that Neanderthals had a more or less mobile lifestyle, like more recent hunter-gatherers. Still the techniques used are interesting, and I haven't posted anything to this thread in a while.

"Modern analysis of ancient hearths reveals Neanderthal settlement patterns" | ScienceDaily (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190424153724.htm)

QuoteAncient fire remains provide evidence of Neanderthal group mobility and settlement patterns and indicate specific occupation episodes, according to a new study published in PLOS ONE on April 24, 2019 by Lucia Leierer and colleagues from Universidad de La Laguna, Spain.

Most paleolithic household activities are thought to have taken place around hearths or fires. The author of the present study chose to examine the Middle Paleolithic site El Salt in Spain, which contains eleven well-preserved and overlapping open-air hearth structures. It was previously unclear whether these hearths were formed during successive short-term site occupations or fewer, longer term occupations. The authors examined the micromorphology of the different layers within the hearth structures to assess occupation timings within the study unit and conducted both a lipid biomarker analysis and isotope analysis to gain information about potential food and fuel.

The results of the analyses show stratified hearths built on multiple different topsoils over different periods of time. The burned organic matter present at the El Salt hearths is rich in herbivore excrement and flowering plant residues. The presence of flint and bone shards, as well as conifer wood charcoal collected from trees not present at the site, provide evidence of limited activity at the site. The authors suggest these data indicate at least four successive short-term Neanderthal occupations separated by relatively long periods of time, potentially based around the seasons.

The authors suggest their molecular and micromorphological methods would work well at similar paleolithic sites where fires were built. Their findings provide evidence for successive short-term Neanderthal occupations at this site, and could inform our understanding of Neanderthal group mobility and settlement more generally.

[Continues . . . (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190424153724.htm)]

23 and Me tells me that I have 298 Neanderthal variants in my genome, which is more than 83% of their customers. They must have been a very intelligent group.

And, something on the Neanderthals' cousins, the Denisovians:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/19/world/denisovan-first-look-scn/index.html

https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/could-neanderthals-have-high-pitched-voices/

Thank you, xSilverPhinx. I liked the ideas and analysis, but the demonstration of them left much to be desired.  ;D

Quote from: Recusant on November 04, 2019, 01:18:22 PM
...but the demonstration of them left a much to be desired.  ;D

:lol:

Could almost be worthy of a Monty Python sketch, no?  ;D

whoever said that science had to be serious?

Two recent articles here. First, Neanderthal footprints on the shore in France. (The Ars Technica site limits the number of free articles available per month, but most likely if you regularly visit there, you already have a subscription.)

"80,000-year-old footprints reveal Neanderthal social life" | Ars Technica (https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09/80000-year-old-footprints-reveal-neanderthal-social-life/)

QuoteA rapidly growing set of archaeological evidence tells us that Neanderthals thought symbolically, made art and jewelry, buried their dead, and probably tended to their sick and wounded. We have direct evidence of what they ate, what kinds of tools they used, and how they made those tools. But when it comes to what kinds of groups they lived in and how those groups were organized, the best anthropologists can do is look at how modern hunter-gatherers live in similar conditions. If Neanderthals lived like hunter-gatherers live today, they probably spent most of their time in groups of between 10 and 30 people, mostly relatives, made up of a mixture of adults and children.

That lines up well with estimates of how many people could have lived in some of the Neanderthal living areas archaeologists have excavated. Those are good ways to develop ideas about Neanderthal social groups, but they're still indirect. On the other hand (ha!), archaeological evidence doesn't get much more direct than footprints.

[. . .]

Most of the prints are just single steps preserved here and there, not lengthy sets of tracks. But they give archaeologists an idea of how many Neanderthals lived at Le Rozel at one time. In the Pleistocene dunes at Le Rozel, muddy sand would have held tracks well, and windblown sand would have quickly filled and covered them. As a result, archaeologists can be reasonably sure that all the Neanderthals whose prints show up in the same sediment layer were walking around Le Rozel at the same time.

Duveau and his colleagues say the prints record the presence of between 10 and 13 Neanderthals. That lines up with anthropologists' other estimates for the size of Neanderthal groups; the Le Rozel group seems to have been relatively small by the standards of modern hunter-gatherers, but not small enough to be unusual.

[. . .]

At least one of the Le Rozel Neanderthals seems to have been unusually tall, standing at around 175cm (5 foot 9). That's a bit above the 168cm (5 foot 6) average for a Neanderthal male. But based on the size of the prints, the group seems to have been mostly children and teenagers, who outnumbered the adults by at least four to one. The smallest prints at the site were just 11.2cm (4.4 inches) long, about the size of a 2-year-old child.

[Continues . . . (https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/09/80000-year-old-footprints-reveal-neanderthal-social-life/)]

---

---

Next, a flint tool with glue refined from birch bark shows that Neanderthals were technically proficient and spent time to plan and make such an item.

"50,000-year-old, tar-smeared tool shows Neanderthal smarts" | Science (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/50000-year-old-tar-smeared-tool-shows-neanderthal-smarts)

QuoteOld-school scholars considered Neanderthals brutish and simple, but recent research shows they made jewelry, had a precision grip, and may have even painted cave art. Now, a tar-caked tool found on a Dutch beach supports the idea that Neanderthals could accomplish complex, multistep tasks that took planning ahead over several days.

In 2016, an amateur collector named Willy van Wingerden found a flint flake partly covered in thick black tar on the Zandmotor, an artificial beach in the Netherlands. The beach, made from sand dredged from the bottom of the North Sea, is a treasure trove of prehistoric artifacts. That's because the sand used to be part of a wide expanse of dry, cold steppe, connecting the United Kingdom and the Netherlands during the last ice age, when sea levels were much lower than they are today.

At first glance, the tool doesn't look like much—a small, sharp-edged flint flake with a gob of tar on the end. Once it hardened, the tar provided enough of a handhold for someone to use the flake's sharp edge as a scraper or blade. "It looks quite simple, but it's quite a complex tool," says lead author Marcel Niekus, an independent archaeologist in the Netherlands who analyzed the find. "It took a lot of steps to make and haft the piece."

When Niekus and his colleagues used radiocarbon dating to analyze the tar on the flake, they found it was 50,000 years old, dating back to a time before modern humans arrived, they write today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The tar, preserved by the cold, oxygen-free conditions in sediments several meters beneath the sea floor, might have been an essential element of Stone Age tool kits, says co-author Geeske Langejans, an archaeologist at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. She and her colleagues tried to recreate tool's manufacture, collecting strips of birch bark, mounding clay over them, and building a fire on top to heat the bark inside to 300°C–400°C for hours. The procedure was hot enough to produce thick tar, as the resinous bark disintegrated. By comparing the chemical composition of the modern tar and its impurities to the ancient tar, Langejans and her team found that the Neanderthals likely used the same procedure.

[Continues . . . (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/10/50000-year-old-tar-smeared-tool-shows-neanderthal-smarts)]

A good (though somewhat long) article about recent finds at the Shanidar cave. This is the site where, many decades ago, Neanderthals remains were found closely associated with pollen, which suggested possible burial rites, or at least leaving flowers with the dead. The site had been unavailable to paleontologists for a long time due to its proximity to ongoing conflicts in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq.

"Shanidar Z" | University of Cambridge (https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/shanidarz)

Quote

(https://i.imgur.com/hFQzhti.jpg)
The Neanderthal skull, flattened by thousands of years of sediment and rock fall,
in situ in Shanidar Cave, Iraqi Kurdistan.
Image credit: University of Cambridge

---

A graveyard of 35 people lain to rest over 10,000 years ago was uncovered in Shanidar Cave by archaeologist Ralph Solecki in 1960.

This cemetery was found at the end of four seasons of excavation, during which time Solecki discovered something more extraordinary: the partial remains of ten Neanderthal men, women and children. Mid-20th century techniques could only date them to over 45,000 years ago.

Stockier than us, with heavy brows and sloping foreheads, it had long been assumed that Neanderthals were primitive and animalistic: subhuman. Evolutionary losers ultimately rendered extinct by their own deficiencies.

However, Shanidar Cave suggested a far more sophisticated creature. One male had a disabled arm, deafness and head trauma that likely rendered him partially blind. Yet he had lived a long time, so must have been cared for. Signs of compassion. 

Four individuals were found clustered together in a "unique assemblage", with ancient pollen clumped in the sediment around one of the bodies. Solecki claimed this as evidence of Neanderthal burial rites: repeated interments; the laying of flowers on the deceased. Human-like ritual behaviour.

Controversy ensued, and still lingers. Does Shanidar Cave show that Neanderthals mourned for and buried their dead? Were they far closer to us in thought and action? What does this mean for the evolution of our lineage?

"Undergraduates across the world studying pre-history get asked a version of: Neanderthals were nasty, brutish and short – discuss. The Shanidar flower burial always comes up," says Prof Graeme Barker, Fellow of St John's College and former Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

One such student essayist at Cambridge would eventually be among the first archaeologists allowed back into Shanidar Cave for more than fifty years. "I stood at the bottom of the hill leading up to the cave and thought: how am I getting to do this?" says Dr Emma Pomeroy, now a lecturer at the University. 

[. . .]

"We thought with luck we'd be able to find the locations where Solecki had discovered the Neanderthals, and see if we could date sediments with techniques they didn't have back in the fifties," says Barker. "We didn't think we'd be lucky enough to find more Neanderthal bones." 

In 2016, down in the "Deep Sounding" of the Solecki trench, while working on the eastern face, a rib emerged from the wall, followed by the arch of a lumbar vertebra, then the bones of a clenched right hand. Archaeologists would have to wait until the following year to begin excavating the delicate remains from beneath metres of rock and soil.

During 2018 and 2019, the team uncovered a seemingly complete skull, flattened by thousands of years of sediment, and upper body bones almost to the waist – with the left hand curled under the head like a small cushion.

[Continues . . . (https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/shanidarz)]

The full paper is available for free:

"New Neanderthal remains associated with the 'flower burial' at Shanidar Cave" | Antiquity (https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/E7E94F650FF5488680829048FA72E32A/S0003598X19002072a.pdf/new_neanderthal_remains_associated_with_the_flower_burial_at_shanidar_cave.pdf)

QuoteAbstract:

Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan became an iconic Palaeolithic site following Ralph Solecki's mid twentieth-century discovery of Neanderthal remains. Solecki argued that some of these individuals had died in rockfalls and controversially—that others were interred with formal burial rites, including one with flowers.

Recent excavations have revealed the articulated upper body of an adult Neanderthal located close to the 'flower burial' location—the first articulated Neanderthal discovered in over 25 years. Stratigraphic evidence suggests that the individual was intentionally buried. This new find offers the rare opportunity to investigate Neanderthal mortuary practices utilising modern archaeological techniques.

Living on the seaside; there are worse things.

This may comfort the aquatic ape crowd a bit.   :evilgrin:

"Neandertals went underwater for their tools" | EurekAlert! (https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-01/p-nwu010820.php)

QuoteNeandertals collected clam shells and volcanic rock from the beach and coastal waters of Italy during the Middle Paleolithic, according to a study published January 15, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Paola Villa of the University of Colorado and colleagues.

Neandertals are known to have used tools, but the extent to which they were able to exploit coastal resources has been questioned. In this study, Villa and colleagues explored artifacts from the Neandertal archaeological cave site of Grotta dei Moscerini in Italy, one of two Neandertal sites in the country with an abundance of hand-modified clam shells, dating back to around 100,000 years ago.

The authors examined 171 modified shells, most of which had be retouched to be used as scrapers. All of these shells belonged to the Mediterranean smooth clam species Callista chione. Based on the state of preservation of the shells, including shell damage and encrustation on the shells by marine organisms, the authors inferred that nearly a quarter of the shells had been collected underwater from the sea floor, as live animals, as opposed to being washed up on the beach. In the same cave sediments, the authors also found abundant pumice stones likely used as abrading tools, which apparently drifted via sea currents from erupting volcanoes in the Gulf of Naples (70km south) onto the Moscerini beach, where they were collected by Neandertals.

These findings join a growing list of evidence that Neandertals in Western Europe were in the practice of wading or diving into coastal waters to collect resources long before Homo sapiens brought these habits to the region.

[Continues . . . (https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-01/p-nwu010820.php)]

Full paper available: "Neandertals on the beach: Use of marine resources at Grotta dei Moscerini (Latium, Italy)" | PLOS ONE (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0226690)

This one confused me for a while. The words Neanderthal and string struck a chord with me, so to speak. I looked back, and yes there it was, in 2013; a report about what appeared to be a piece of string made by Neanderthals approximately 90,000 years ago ("World's oldest string found at French Neanderthal site" | New Scientist (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029432-800-worlds-oldest-string-found-at-french-neanderthal-site/)). 

Now the news tells us that they've found the oldest string made by Neanderthals, and it's about 50,000 years old, found in the same cave system (Abri du Maras) as the earlier find. Further, they tell us the oldest string found previously was only 19,000 years old, from Israel, and made by Homo sapiens.

No mention of the previous find from Abri du Maras, even though it appeared in the same publication. I suppose there's some subtext here, in which "that sure looks like string" is in a different class of find from "hey, I found some string here."   :shrug:

"Oldest ever piece of string was made by Neanderthals 50,000 years ago" | New Scientist (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2240117-oldest-ever-piece-of-string-was-made-by-neanderthals-50000-years-ago/)

Quote

(https://i.imgur.com/Dy1bC8p.png)
Enlarged Hirox [digital microscope] photo with cord structure highlighted [false color image].
Image Credit: N. Mélard (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61839-w)

---

QuoteA piece of 50,000-year-old string found in a cave in France is the oldest ever discovered. It suggests that Neanderthals knew how to twist fibres together to make cords – and, if so, they might have been able to craft ropes, clothes, bags and nets.

"None can be done without that initial step," says Bruce Hardy at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. "Twisted fibres are a foundational technology."

His team has been excavating the Abri du Maras caves in south-east France where Neanderthals lived (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2207681-ancient-dna-reveals-neanderthal-migration-and-interbreeding/) for long periods. Three metres below today's surface, in a layer that is between 52,000 and 41,000 years old, it found a stone flake, a sharp piece of rock used as an early stone tool.

Examining the flake under a microscope revealed that a tiny piece of string (pictured top right), just 6 millimetres long and 0.5 millimetres wide, was stuck to its underside. It was made by twisting a bundle of fibres in an anticlockwise direction, known as an S-twist. Three bundles were twisted together in a clockwise direction – a Z-twist – to make a 3-ply cord.

"It is exactly what you would see if you picked up a piece of string today," says Hardy. The string wasn't necessarily used to attach the stone tool to a handle. It could have been part of a bag or net, the team speculates.

The string appears to be made of bast fibres from the bark of conifer trees, which helps establish that it isn't a stray bit of modern string, because "nobody at the site was wearing their conifer pants at the time", says Hardy.

"It's so fine. That's really surprising," says Rebecca Wragg Sykes at the University of Bordeaux in France. This suggests the string wasn't used for heavy-duty tasks, but instead as some kind of thread,  she says.

[Continues . . . (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2240117-oldest-ever-piece-of-string-was-made-by-neanderthals-50000-years-ago/)]

NPR article with audio version available: "The Oldest String Ever Found May Have Been Made By Neanderthals" | NPR (https://www.npr.org/2020/04/10/828400733/the-oldest-string-ever-found-may-have-been-made-by-neanderthals)

The full paper is open access:

"Direct evidence of Neanderthal fibre technology and its cognitive and behavioral implications" | Scientific Reports (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61839-w)

Just for the hell of it, I found a PDF of the paper from 2013 online for free as well:

"Impossible Neanderthals? Making string, throwing projectiles and catching small game during Marine Isotope Stage 4 (Abri du Maras, France)" | Quaternary Science Reviews (http://www.unife.it/interfacolta/lm.preistoria/insegnamenti/archeozoologia-1/materiale-didattico/a-a-2013-2014/presentazioni-8-13-14-gennaio/14-gennaio/hardy-et-al-2013.pdf)

So, Neanderthals came up with "String Theory".  Nice.

Quote from: Ecurb Noselrub on April 15, 2020, 06:33:38 PM
So, Neanderthals came up with "String Theory".  Nice.

:doh:

Yeah, OK, fair enough.  :lol:

I don't know if it's in this thread or its missing predecessor, but you may recall that there has been some discussion of the deleterious effects of some of the Neanderthal genes that non-African populations carry. Predisposition to some genetic diseases was the primary one mentioned as I recall. The paper described in the article below reports on evidence of a positive effect produced by Neanderthal genes.

"Increased fertility for women with Neanderthal gene, study suggests" | ScienceDaily (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200526151738.htm)

QuoteOne in three women in Europe inherited the receptor for progesterone from Neandertals -- a gene variant associated with increased fertility, fewer bleedings during early pregnancy and fewer miscarriages. This is according to a study published in Molecular Biology and Evolution by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany and Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

"The progesterone receptor is an example of how favourable genetic variants that were introduced into modern humans by mixing with Neandertals can have effects in people living today," says Hugo Zeberg, researcher at the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who performed the study with colleagues Janet Kelso and Svante Pääbo.

Progesterone is a hormone, which plays an important role in the menstrual cycle and in pregnancy. Analyses of biobank data from more than 450,000 participants -- among them 244,000 women -- show that almost one in three women in Europe have inherited the progesterone receptor from Neandertals. Twenty-nine percent carry one copy of the Neandertal receptor and three percent have two copies.

[Continues . . . (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/05/200526151738.htm)]

The full paper is open access:

"The Neandertal Progesterone Receptor" | Molecular Biology and Evolution (https://academic.oup.com/mbe/advance-article/doi/10.1093/molbev/msaa119/5841671)

Paragraph breaks added below.

QuoteAbstract:

The hormone progesterone is important for preparing the uterine lining for egg implantation and in maintaining the early stages of pregnancy. The gene encoding the progesterone receptor (PGR) carries introgressed Neandertal haplotypes with two non-synonymous substitutions and a mobile Alu element. They have reached nearly 20% frequency in non-Africans and have been associated with preterm birth.

Here we show that whereas one of the missense substitutions appears fixed among Neandertals, the other substitution as well as the Alu insertion were polymorphic among Neandertals. We show that two Neandertal haplotypes carrying the PGR gene entered the modern human population and that present-day carriers of the Neandertal haplotypes express higher levels of the receptor.

In a cohort of present-day Britons, these carriers have more siblings, fewer miscarriages and less bleeding during early pregnancy suggesting that it promotes fertility. This may explain the high frequency of the Neandertal progesterone receptor alleles in modern human populations.

A couple of stories for this post. First--some genetic vulnerability to effects of COVID-19 appears to be inherited from Neanderthals.

"Study: Neanderthal genes are a liability for COVID patients" | Medical Xpress (https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-09-neanderthal-genes-liability-covid-patients.html)

QuoteScientists say genes that some people have inherited from their Neanderthal ancestors may increase their likelihood of suffering severe forms of COVID-19.

A study by European scientists published Wednesday by the journal Nature examined a cluster of genes that have been linked to a higher risk of hospitalization and respiratory failure in patients who are infected with the new coronavirus.

Researchers Hugo Zeberg and Svante Paabo determined that the genes belong to a group, or haplotype, which likely came from Neanderthals. The haplotype is found in about 16% of the population in Europe and half the population in South Asia, while in Africa and East Asia it is non-existent.

Modern humans and Neanderthals are known to have interbred at various points in history, resulting in an exchange of genes than can still be found today.

The genes are one of several risk factors for COVID-19, including age, sex and pre-existing conditions like obesity, diabetes and heart problems.

[Continues . . . (https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-09-neanderthal-genes-liability-covid-patients.html)]

A preprint version of the paper (PDF download) is currently available:

"The major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals" | Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2818-3)

QuoteAbstract:

A recent genetic association study identified a gene cluster on chromosome 3 as a risk locus for respiratory failure upon SARS-CoV-2 infection. A new study comprising 3,199 hospitalized COVID-19 patients and controls finds that this is the major genetic risk factor for severe SARS-CoV-2 infection and hospitalization (COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative). Here, we show that the risk is conferred by a genomic segment of ~50 kb that is inherited from Neanderthals and is carried by ~50% of people in South Asia and ~16% of people in Europe today.

Second--an intriguing finding about the Neanderthal Y chromosome.

"Y chromosomes of Neandertals and Denisovans now sequenced" | Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (https://www.mpg.de/15426102/neandertal-y-chromosome)

QuoteAn international research team led by Martin Petr and Janet Kelso of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has determined Y chromosome sequences of three Neandertals and two Denisovans. These Y chromosomes provide new insights into the relationships and population histories of archaic and modern humans, including new evidence for ancient gene flow from early modern humans into Neandertals. The data show that Neandertals may have benefited from these interactions as the gene flow resulted in the complete replacement of the original Neandertal Y chromosomes by their early modern human counterparts.

[. . .]

In this study, the researchers identified three male Neandertals and two Denisovans that were potentially suitable for DNA analysis, and developed an approach to fish out human Y chromosome molecules from the large amounts of microbial DNA that typically contaminate ancient bones and teeth. This allowed them to reconstruct the Y chromosome sequences of these individuals, which would not have been possible using conventional approaches.

By comparing the archaic human Y chromosomes to each other and to the Y chromosomes of people living today, the team found that Neandertal and modern human Y chromosomes are more similar to one another than they are to Denisovan Y chromosomes. "This was quite a surprise to us. We know from studying their autosomal DNA that Neandertals and Denisovans were closely related and that humans living today are their more distant evolutionary cousins. Before we first looked at the data, we expected that their Y chromosomes would show a similar picture," says Martin Petr, the lead author of the study. The researchers also calculated that the most recent common ancestor of Neandertal and modern human Y chromosomes lived around 370,000 years ago, much more recently than previously thought.

[Continues . . . (https://www.mpg.de/15426102/neandertal-y-chromosome)]

The paper (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6511/1653) is behind a paywall.

QuoteAbstract:

Ancient DNA has provided new insights into many aspects of human history. However, we lack comprehensive studies of the Y chromosomes of Denisovans and Neanderthals because the majority of specimens that have been sequenced to sufficient coverage are female. Sequencing Y chromosomes from two Denisovans and three Neanderthals shows that the Y chromosomes of Denisovans split around 700 thousand years ago from a lineage shared by Neanderthals and modern human Y chromosomes, which diverged from each other around 370 thousand years ago. The phylogenetic relationships of archaic and modern human Y chromosomes differ from the population relationships inferred from the autosomal genomes and mirror mitochondrial DNA phylogenies, indicating replacement of both the mitochondrial and Y chromosomal gene pools in late Neanderthals. This replacement is plausible if the low effective population size of Neanderthals resulted in an increased genetic load in Neanderthals relative to modern humans.

DOH! You beat me to it! I posted this in another thread, but should have read through the new threads first.

Genetic analysis is changing ideas about migrations and degree of Neanderthal ancestry:

"Genome analysis reveals unknown ancient human migration in Europe" | Phys.org (https://phys.org/news/2021-04-genome-analysis-reveals-unknown-ancient.html)

QuoteGenetic sequencing of human remains dating back 45,000 years has revealed a previously unknown migration into Europe and showed intermixing with Neanderthals in that period was more common than previously thought.

The research is based on the analysis of several ancient human remains—including a whole tooth and bone fragments—found in a cave in Bulgaria last year.

Genetic sequencing found the remains came from individuals who were more closely linked to present-day populations in East Asia and the Americas than populations in Europe.

"This indicates that they belonged to a modern human migration into Europe that was not previously known from the genetic record," the research, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, said.

It also "provides evidence that there was at least some continuity between the earliest modern humans in Europe and later people in Eurasia", the study added.

[. . .]

The findings were accompanied by separate research published Wednesday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution involving genome sequencing of samples from a skull found in the Czech Republic.

The skull was found in the Zlaty kun area in 1950, but its age has been the subject of debate and contradictory findings in the decades since.

Initial analysis suggested it was older than 30,000 years old, but radiocarbon dating gave an age closer to 15,000 years.

Genetic analysis now appears to have resolved the matter, suggesting an age of at least 45,000 years old, said Kay Prufer of the Max Planck Institute's department of archaeogenetics, who led the research.

"We make use of the fact that everyone who traces their ancestry back to the individuals that left Africa more than 50,000 years ago carries a bit of Neanderthal ancestry in their genomes," he told AFP.

These Neanderthal traces appear in short blocks in modern human genomes, and increasingly longer ones further back in human history.

"In older individuals, such as the 45,000-year-old Ust'-Ishim man from Siberia, these blocks are much longer," Prufer said.

"We find that the genome of the Zlaty kun woman has even longer blocks than those of the Ust'-Ishim man. This makes us confident that she lived at the same time, or even earlier."

It seems to me that Prufer is dismissing the radiocarbon dating result rather breezily, but perhaps the paper provides something more substantial. Speaking of which, both papers appear to be open access.

"Initial Upper Palaeolithic humans in Europe had recent Neanderthal ancestry" | Nature (https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03335-3)

"A genome sequence from a modern human skull over 45,000 years old from Zlatý kůň in Czechia" | Nature Ecology and Evolution (http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01443-x)

According to a new paper, about 65,000 years ago our cousins ventured into a cave in Spain to decorate a stalagmite with ochre. They came back about ten thousand years later to do it again.

"Neanderthals painted stalagmites red" | Cosmos (https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/neanderthals-painted-stalagmites-with-ochre/)

QuoteDeep in Cueva de Ardales (Cave of Ardales) in Spain, stalagmites have been painted red by artistic Neanderthals, according to a study published in PNAS.

Stalagmites, or flowstones, are long, hanging spikes made from calcite and other carbonate materials that form where water flows down cave walls and floors. The stalagmites in Cueva de Ardales, near Málaga on Spain's south coast, are stained red in places, but it had previously been unclear whether the colouring was natural or painted.

Now, an international team of researchers, led by Africa Pitarch Martí from the University of Barcelona, Spain, has used different forms of microscopy and spectroscopy – studying how light is absorbed – to determine that the red pigment is made of ochre and not the iron-oxide-rich deposits of the cave.

This means they couldn't have been stained naturally as the stalagmites formed, and so must have been painted.

The team found that the ochre-based pigment was applied twice – once more than 65,000 years ago and again between 45,000 and 49,000 years ago. This is when Neanderthals occupied the area, before early humans came to Europe.

[Continues . . . (https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/archaeology/neanderthals-painted-stalagmites-with-ochre/)]

The paper (https://www.pnas.org/content/118/33/e2021495118) is behind a paywall, but here's the --

QuoteAbstract:

Cueva de Ardales in Málaga, Spain, is one of the richest and best-preserved Paleolithic painted caves of southwestern Europe, containing over a thousand graphic representations. Here, we study the red pigment in panel II.A.3 of "Sala de las Estrellas," dated by U-Th to the Middle Paleolithic, to determine its composition, verify its anthropogenic nature, infer the associated behaviors, and discuss their implications. Using optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy, micro-Raman spectroscopy, and X-ray diffraction, we analyzed a set of samples from the panel and compared them to natural coloring materials collected from the floor and walls of the cave. The conspicuously different texture and composition of the geological samples indicates that the pigments used in the paintings do not come from the outcrops of colorant material known in the cave. We confirm that the paintings are not the result of natural processes and show that the composition of the paint is consistent with the artistic activity being recurrent. Our results strengthen the hypothesis that Neanderthals symbolically used these paintings and the large stalagmitic dome harboring them over an extended time span.

Neanderthal cave in Gibraltar.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/neanderthals-cave-gibraltar-scn-scli-intl/index.html


[Repaired link. - R]

Very cool! Thank you, Ecurb Noselrub.  :thumbsup:

There must be a story behind this. Anatomically modern humans (AMH) lived at a cave site in southeastern France for about 40 years, then Neanderthals were back for the next few thousand years. One wonders how did the AMH arrive and why did they leave?

Apparently the finding is partly based on analysis of soot in the cave. I haven't read the paper yet, so I don't know how or if they differentiate between soot from a Neanderthal fire and that from an AMH fire.

"New research suggests modern humans lived in Europe 10,000 years earlier than previously thought, in Neanderthal territories" | The Conversation (https://theconversation.com/new-research-suggests-modern-humans-lived-in-europe-10-000-years-earlier-than-previously-thought-in-neanderthal-territories-176648)

QuotePerched about 325 feet (100 meters) up the slopes of the Prealps in southern France, a humble rock shelter looks out over the Rhône River Valley. It's a strategic point on the landscape, as here the Rhône flows through a narrows between two mountain ranges. For millennia, inhabitants of the rock shelter would have had commanding views of herds of animals migrating between the Mediterranean region and the plains of northern Europe, today replaced by TGV trains and up to 180,000 vehicles per day on one of the busiest highways on the continent.

The site, recognized in the 1960s and named Grotte Mandrin after French folk hero Louis Mandrin, has been a valued location for over 100,000 years. The stone artifacts and animal bones left behind by ancient hunter-gatherers from the Paleolithic period were quickly covered by the glacial dust that blew from the north on the famous mistral winds, keeping the remains well preserved.

Since 1990, our research team has been carefully investigating the uppermost 10 feet (3 meters) of sediment on the cave floor. Based on artifacts and tooth fossils, we believe that Mandrin rewrites the consensus story about when modern humans first made their way to Europe.

Human origins researchers have generally agreed that between 300,000 and 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals and their ancestors occupied Europe. From time to time during that period, they had contact with modern humans in the Levant and parts of Asia. Then around 48,000 to 45,000 years ago, modern humans – essentially us – expanded throughout the rest of the world, and Neanderthals and all other archaic humans disappeared.

In the journal Science Advances, we describe our discovery of evidence that modern humans lived 54,000 years ago at Mandrin. That's some 10 millennia earlier than our species was previously thought to be in Europe and over a thousand miles west (1,700 kilometers) from the next-oldest known site, in Bulgaria. And fascinatingly, Neanderthals appear to have used the cave both before and after the modern human occupation.

[Continues . . . (https://theconversation.com/new-research-suggests-modern-humans-lived-in-europe-10-000-years-earlier-than-previously-thought-in-neanderthal-territories-176648)]

The paper is open access:

"Modern human incursion into Neanderthal territories 54,000 years ago at Mandrin, France" | Science Advances (https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.abj9496)

QuoteDetermining the extent of overlap between modern humans and other hominins in Eurasia, such as Neanderthals and Denisovans, is fundamental to understanding the nature of their interactions and what led to the disappearance of archaic hominins. Apart from a possible sporadic pulse recorded in Greece during the Middle Pleistocene, the first settlements of modern humans in Europe have been constrained to ~45,000 to 43,000 years ago.

Here, we report hominin fossils from Grotte Mandrin in France that reveal the earliest known presence of modern humans in Europe between 56,800 and 51,700 years ago. This early modern human incursion in the Rhône Valley is associated with technologies unknown in any industry of that age outside Africa or the Levant. Mandrin documents the first alternating occupation of Neanderthals and modern humans, with a modern human fossil and associated Neronian lithic industry found stratigraphically between layers containing Neanderthal remains associated with Mousterian industries.

This thread has been quiet for some time, but not for as long as the cave described in the article below . . .

"Neanderthals were the world's first artists" | University of Basel (https://www.unibas.ch/en/News-Events/News/Uni-Research/Neanderthals-were-the-world-s-first-artists.html)

QuoteWhen the French archaeologist Jean-Claude Marquet entered the La Roche-Cotard cave in the Loire Valley for the first time back in 1974, he suspected that the fine lines on the wall could be of human origin. He also found scrapers and other retouched pieces known as Mousterian stone artifacts that suggested the cave had been used by Neanderthals. Were the marks on the wall evidence of early Neanderthal artistic activity?

Posing this question raised the possibility of breaking with the consensus of the time, which largely assumed that Homo neanderthalensis lacked any higher cognitive abilities. Fearing he would be unable to provide sufficient scientific evidence to prove his hypothesis, Marquet left the cave untouched for almost 40 years.

Together with an international team, he made another attempt in 2016. This time he was accompanied by Dr. Dorota Wojtczak from Integrative Prehistoric and Archaeological Science (IPAS) at the Department of Environmental Sciences of the University of Basel, who specializes in archaeological use-wear analysis. "Our task was to use modern methods to prove the human origin of these wall engravings," explains Wojtczak in her office at IPAS. The researchers recently published their findings in the journal PLOS ONE.

First with photos and drawings and later with a 3D scanner, the marks in the tuff rock of the cave wall were meticulously recorded. In her laboratory in Basel, Wojtczak compared these samples from the cave with tuff she had worked on experimentally with wood, bone and stone tools, as well as with her hands. "This research clearly showed that the cave marks were not made with tools, but by scratching with human fingers," says Wojtczak.

At the same time, examination of cave sediment by researchers from Denmark showed that the cave must have been sealed off by mud residues from the Loire and soil sediments for over 50,000 years before being rediscovered. This makes the La Roche-Cotard cave system a very special location – a veritable "time capsule". "At this time, 50,000 years ago, there were no modern humans in Europe, only Neanderthals," says Wojtczak. The wall marks and artifacts can therefore only come from these early humans.

[Continues . . . (https://www.unibas.ch/en/News-Events/News/Uni-Research/Neanderthals-were-the-world-s-first-artists.html)]

The paper is open access:

"The earliest unambiguous Neanderthal engravings on cave walls: La Roche-Cotard, Loire Valley, France" | PLOS ONE (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0286568)

QuoteAbstract:

Here we report on Neanderthal engravings on a cave wall at La Roche-Cotard (LRC) in central France, made more than 57±3 thousand years ago. Following human occupation, the cave was completely sealed by cold-period sediments, which prevented access until its discovery in the 19th century and first excavation in the early 20th century.

The timing of the closure of the cave is based on 50 optically stimulated luminescence ages derived from sediment collected inside and from around the cave. The anthropogenic origin of the spatially-structured, non-figurative marks found within the cave is confirmed using taphonomic, traceological and experimental evidence.

Cave closure occurred significantly before the regional arrival of H. sapiens, and all artefacts from within the cave are typical Mousterian lithics; in Western Europe these are uniquely attributed to H. neanderthalensis. We conclude that the LRC engravings are unambiguous examples of Neanderthal abstract design.

Stone age art and now we have art in concrete :)