The Neanderthals
Neanderthals - Homo sapiens and the Neanderthals shared a common ancestor, who lived about 500,000 years ago
The common ancestor of modern humans (Homo sapiens) and the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) lived in Africa around half a million years ago. After that, the ancestors of the Neanderthals, our closest living relatives (our genes differ by just 0.5%), moved north and eventually finished up in Europe and Asia. They dominated Eurasia for the better part of 200,000 years. “During that time, they poked their famously large and protruding noses into every corner of Europe, and beyond—south along the Mediterranean from the Strait of Gibraltar to Greece and Iraq, north to Russia, as far west as Britain, and almost to Mongolia in the east. Scientists estimate that even at the height of the Neanderthal occupation of western Europe, their total number probably never exceeded 15,000. Yet they managed to endure, even when a cooling climate turned much of their territory into something like northern Scandinavia today—a frigid, barren tundra, its bleak horizon broken by a few scraggly trees and just enough lichen to keep the reindeer happy”[1]
Neanderthals, 130,000-28,000 yrs ago
Neanderthals first appear in the archaeological record about 130,000 years ago, and they vanish from the record as recently as 28,000 years ago - more than 25,000 years before the Egyptian pharaohs. Once in Eurasia, they survived tens of thousands of years of ice ages and climate fluctuations, but during one very cold period from about 60,000 years ago, modern humans spread across Europe. Their presence may have prevented Neanderthals from expanding back into areas they once favoured, and over just a few thousand years, Neanderthal numbers dwindled to extinction, thus:
The common ancestor of modern humans (Homo sapiens) and the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) lived in Africa around half a million years ago. After that, the ancestors of the Neanderthals, our closest living relatives (our genes differ by just 0.5%), moved north and eventually finished up in Europe and Asia. They dominated Eurasia for the better part of 200,000 years. “During that time, they poked their famously large and protruding noses into every corner of Europe, and beyond—south along the Mediterranean from the Strait of Gibraltar to Greece and Iraq, north to Russia, as far west as Britain, and almost to Mongolia in the east. Scientists estimate that even at the height of the Neanderthal occupation of western Europe, their total number probably never exceeded 15,000. Yet they managed to endure, even when a cooling climate turned much of their territory into something like northern Scandinavia today—a frigid, barren tundra, its bleak horizon broken by a few scraggly trees and just enough lichen to keep the reindeer happy”[1]
Neanderthals, 130,000-28,000 yrs ago
Neanderthals first appear in the archaeological record about 130,000 years ago, and they vanish from the record as recently as 28,000 years ago - more than 25,000 years before the Egyptian pharaohs. Once in Eurasia, they survived tens of thousands of years of ice ages and climate fluctuations, but during one very cold period from about 60,000 years ago, modern humans spread across Europe. Their presence may have prevented Neanderthals from expanding back into areas they once favoured, and over just a few thousand years, Neanderthal numbers dwindled to extinction, thus:
The human and Neanderthal lines diverged 700,000-550,000 yrs ago. They constitute separate geographic and evolutionary branches splitting from a common ancestor
The first Neanderthal fossils were found in 1856 in the Neander valley in Germany, and recent genetic tests using remnant DNA from Neanderthal fossils suggest that the human and Neanderthal lines diverged perhaps as much as 700,000 to 550,000 years ago, long before the modern human migration out of Africa. Thus the two species represent separate geographic and evolutionary branches splitting from a common ancestor. "North of the Mediterranean, this lineage became Neanderthals and south of the Mediterranean, it became us".
For the past 20 years the prevailing view of the origin of modern humans was relatively straightforward: about 160,000 years ago a small, isolated population of archaic humans, most likely in east Africa, evolved the anatomical characteristics that define modern humans. According to this "single origin" or "out of Africa" model, their descendants spread across the globe, completely replacing existing species, such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus, that were widespread at the time. The view until comparatively recently was that if there was any interbreeding, it was insignificant, and too rare to leave a trace of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA in the cells of living people[2].
[1] Stephen S. Hall, “Last of the Neanderthals”, National Geographic, October 2008, published online at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/10/neanderthals/hall-text
[2] Dan Jones, “The Neanderthal within”, New Scientist, 03 March 2007. But see now Kate Wong, “Neandertal Minds (sic), Scientific American, February 2013, 26 at 33, where it is suggested that the two groups shared the European continent for some 2,600 to 5,400 years before the Neanderthals finally disappeared – plenty of time for interbreeding.
Chart depicting migration patterns of our ancestors to Europe and Asia, bringing them into contact with Neanderthals, Homo erectus and Homo floresiensis, leading to interbreeding and/or the latter species’ extinction, leaving H sapiens as the “last man standing”.
Fossil finds at Lagar Velho, Portugal (24,500 yrs ago) and Muierii, Romania (32,000 yrs old) - a little Neanderthal in each of us, esp for those whose ancestral group developed outside southern Africa
However, more recent research suggests that the two groups shared the European continent for some 2,600 to 5,400 years before the Neanderthals finally disappeared – plenty of time for interbreeding[1]. An admixture of Neanderthals and modern humans has since been found in certain fossils: a 24,500-year-old skeleton of a young child discovered at the Portuguese site of Lagar Velho, and a 32,000-year-old skull from a cave called Muierii in Romania. Analysis of these fossils finds suggests long and extensive interbreeding between early Europeans and the Neanderthals, and there is now strong evidence of interbreeding between the two species, and that any human whose ancestral group developed outside Africa has a little Neanderthal in them - something like between 1 and 4 per cent of their genome[2]. In other words, humans and Neanderthals had sex and had hybrid offspring[3]. So, it might be said that “there's a little bit of Neanderthal in all of us”. Our DNA is a mosaic and we are "genetic mongrels" [3.1]
Any given individual possesses only a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, but not everyone carries the same bits. So patching together Neanderthal pieces from a large sample of modern humans, scientists have been able to reconstruct 35 to 70% of the Neanderthal genome[4].
More recent research has not only tended to corroborate this scenario but to take it further. In late 2014, an international team of geneticists led by Svante Paabo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, were able to extract the DNA from the thighbone of a man who lived about 45,000 years ago and died on the banks of a river in Siberia[5]. He was named Ust’-Ishim after the settlement close to his burial site.
The team used radio carbon dating to establish the bone was about 45,000 years old. The man’s genetic blueprint suggests he came from a population of ancient humans that lived on, or with, the population of Eurasians that separated into western and eastern groups. His genes also narrow the date when modern humans and Neanderthals interbred to between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. Based on the genomes of living people, researchers had previously estimated they interbred between 36,000 and 80,000 years ago. Sequencing ancient DNA in this fashion allows scientists to peer back in time and observe breeding events as they happened, rather than infer what may have happened based on the genomes of contemporary humans[6].
Whilst the Ust’-Ishim man carried a similar amount of Neanderthal DNA as contemporary Eurasians, his were packaged in longer segments. As genetic information is passed from one generation to another, segments of DNA break up and recombine, meaning younger Eurasians would have shorter section of Neanderthal DNA, and “the closer you get to that interbreeding time period, the longer the Neanderthal pieces of chromosomes become”[7].
The results also provide insights into migration patterns as early humans moved out of Africa and across central Asia. One theory suggested that an early coastal migration from Africa gave rise to people now living in Oceania, and a second wave of people from Africa gave rise to Europeans and mainland Asians[8]. But the existence of a 45,000 year old man from Siberia, who is not more closely related to the descendants of either group suggest there may have been another group that migrated through central and east Asia, said the research team.
Genetic evidence now also suggests that a particular gene, microcephalin (a gene that regulates brain and head size characterised by a severely diminished brain and various neurological symptoms) split off from our evolutionary lineage a million years ago, and then jumped back in 40,000 years ago, leading to the inference that the newer version of the gene evolved in a separate species of human - probably Neanderthals - and then entered our lineage (introgressed) through interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans. Once in the human gene pool, the new variant was selectively favoured and now represents about 70 per cent of the worldwide frequency.[9]
Or is the genetic mix simply because we share a common ancestor?
On the other hand, a British study conducted before the Svante Paablo’s 2014 findings in relation to Ust’-Ishim man disputes the fact that inter-species mating (hybridisation) between Neanderhals and humans occurred, and states that if it happened at all, it was minimal. According to this view, sharing a common ancestor is more likely to be the reason behind genetic similarities between the two species, and the existence of a 500,000 year old common ancestry that predates the origin of Neanderthals provides a better explanation for the genetic mix. Diversity between this ancestral species meant that northern Africans were more genetically similar to their European counterparts than southern Africans through geographic proximity. This likeness persisted over time to account for the overlap with the Neanderthal genome we see in modern people today.
The authors discounted the 2010 study which suggested that interspecies liaisons near the Middle East resulted in Neanderthal genes first entering humans more than 70,000 years ago, this being supposedly the reason why modern non-Africans share more with Neanderthals than Africans. But the new study authors are of the view that Northern Africans would be more similar to Europeans and similarity stayed because there wasn’t enough mixing between northern and southern Africans. Whilst hybridisation can never be ruled out entirely, the less the significance attributable to it, the more unlikely it is that it would have shaped the ways modern humans evolved, they said[10].
The El Sidron Neanderthal cave bones, 43,000 yrs old, discovered March 1994 – the FOXP2 gene
As a prelude to these recent findings, in March 1994 140 Neanderthal bones were found in a cave system in northern Spain called El Sidrón, in the province of Asturias, just south of the Bay of Biscay. They turned out to be the fossilised remains of a group of Neanderthals who lived, and perhaps died violently, approximately 43,000 years ago. Two El Sidrón individuals appeared to share, with modern humans, a version of a gene called FOXP2 that contributes to speech and language ability, acting not only in the brain but also on the nerves that control facial muscles[11]. Whether Neanderthals were capable of sophisticated language abilities or a more primitive form of vocal communication (singing, for example) remains unclear, but the new genetic findings suggest they possessed some of the same vocalising hardware as modern humans.
However, on a more general note, other parts of the Neanderthal genome appear to contrast with ours in significant ways. For example, Neanderthals seem to have carried different versions of other genes involved in language, including CNTNAP2. Furthermore, of the 87 genes in modern humans that differ significantly from their counterparts in Neanderthals and another hominim group whom we have yet to meet, the Denisovans, several are involved in brain development and function, raising speculation as to whether or not differences in DNA sequence and gene activity translate to differences in cognition, and here intriguing clues have emerged from studies of those people today who carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA as a result of long-ago interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens[12].
Genetic experiments carried out by geneticist John Blangero of the Texas Biomedical Research Institute on hundreds of patients who still carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA today, suggest that several key brain regions were smaller in Neanderthals than modern humans, including the gray matter surface area (which helps to process information in the brain), Broca’s area (which seems to be involved in language) and the amygdala (which controls emotions and motivation), leading to the conclusion that Neanderthals were almost certainly less cognitively adept than early modern humans[13]. However, these findings are the subject of dispute, John Hanks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison saying pithily: “We know next to nothing about Neanderthal cognition from genetics because we know next to nothing about (modern) human cognition from genetics”[14].
Other Neanderthal fossil finds, 38,000 yrs ago Vindija; Krapinna (Croatia); 130,000 – 120,000 yrs ago; Uzbekistan, Siberia; La Quina (Spain) 75,000 – 40,000 yrs ago: Qafzeh Israeel) 90,000 yrs ago
It has since been possible to work out the entire three-billion-letter sequence of the Neanderthal genome[15], most of the evidence coming from the Croatian specimen, a 38,000-year-old fragment of leg bone found almost 30 years ago in the Vindija cave. Mitochondrial DNA has also been extracted from two fossils of uncertain origin excavated in Uzbekistan and southern Siberia. Both had a uniquely Neanderthal genetic signature. While the Uzbekistan specimen, a young boy, had long been considered a Neanderthal, the Siberian specimen was a surprise, extending the known Neanderthal range some 1,200 miles east of their European stronghold.
[1] Kate Wong, “Neandertal Minds (sic), Scientific American, February 2013, 26 at 33.
[2] Something like 2.5% in the case of Eurasians and North and South Americans and the Australian aborigines: Jamie Schreeve, “The case of the missing ancestor”, National Geographic, July 2013, 90 at 99-100; see also Kate Wong, "Last Hominin standing", Scientific American, September 2018, at 61(Neanderthal DNA makes up some 2% of the genome of Eurasions; Denisovan DNA up to 5% of the DNA of Melanesians).
[3] “Neanderthal genome reveals interbreeding with humans”, New Scientist, 6 May 2010 by Ewen Callaway.
[3.1] The colourful description of Professor Alice Roberts from the University of Birmingham in the BBC documentary The Lost Tribes of Humanity (2016) (fn [4] at the bottom of the page), whose own DNA is 2.7 Neanderthal.
[4] Kate Wong, op cit 29.
[5] Nicky Phillips, “Scientists sequence genome of 45,000 year-old man”, SMH, 23 October 2014. The findings of the team were published in the journal Nature.
[6] Per Jeremy Austin, Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide who was not involved in the research, cited in Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] See generally “The Neanderthal within”, New Scientist, 3 March 2007. Dan Jones. See also David Frayer’s comment “We swamped their gene pool” cited in Kate Wong. Neandertal Minds (sic)”, Scientific American, February 2015, 26 at 33, noted further on.
[10] Mehreen Khan, “Neanderthals shared ancestor with humans”, SMH, Health and Science, 16 August 2012. Researchers from the University of Cambridge are responsible for the paper which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[11] See above, page 15, in relation to the presence of this same gene in chimps, mice and humans.
[12] Kate Wong, op cit, 30.
[13] Ibid at 29 and 31.
[14] Ibid at 31.
[15] Once again, courtesy of Svante Paabo and his team, see Jamie Schreeve, “The case of the missing ancestor”, National Geographic, July 2013, 90 at 95-6.
So, while the new genetic evidence appears to confirm that Neanderthals were a separate species from us, it also suggests that they may have possessed human language and were successful over a far larger sweep of Eurasia than previously thought. There have also since been unearthed two jawbones of Neanderthal juveniles in Krapina, Croatia, dating back 130,000 to 120,000 years; the so-called La Quina skull from a Neanderthal youth, discovered in France and dating from between 75,000 to 40,000 years ago; and two striking 90,000-year-old modern human specimens, teeth intact, found in a rock shelter called Qafzeh in Israel, one pictured below:
Fossil finds at Lagar Velho, Portugal (24,500 yrs ago) and Muierii, Romania (32,000 yrs old) - a little Neanderthal in each of us, esp for those whose ancestral group developed outside southern Africa
However, more recent research suggests that the two groups shared the European continent for some 2,600 to 5,400 years before the Neanderthals finally disappeared – plenty of time for interbreeding[1]. An admixture of Neanderthals and modern humans has since been found in certain fossils: a 24,500-year-old skeleton of a young child discovered at the Portuguese site of Lagar Velho, and a 32,000-year-old skull from a cave called Muierii in Romania. Analysis of these fossils finds suggests long and extensive interbreeding between early Europeans and the Neanderthals, and there is now strong evidence of interbreeding between the two species, and that any human whose ancestral group developed outside Africa has a little Neanderthal in them - something like between 1 and 4 per cent of their genome[2]. In other words, humans and Neanderthals had sex and had hybrid offspring[3]. So, it might be said that “there's a little bit of Neanderthal in all of us”. Our DNA is a mosaic and we are "genetic mongrels" [3.1]
Any given individual possesses only a small amount of Neanderthal DNA, but not everyone carries the same bits. So patching together Neanderthal pieces from a large sample of modern humans, scientists have been able to reconstruct 35 to 70% of the Neanderthal genome[4].
More recent research has not only tended to corroborate this scenario but to take it further. In late 2014, an international team of geneticists led by Svante Paabo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, were able to extract the DNA from the thighbone of a man who lived about 45,000 years ago and died on the banks of a river in Siberia[5]. He was named Ust’-Ishim after the settlement close to his burial site.
The team used radio carbon dating to establish the bone was about 45,000 years old. The man’s genetic blueprint suggests he came from a population of ancient humans that lived on, or with, the population of Eurasians that separated into western and eastern groups. His genes also narrow the date when modern humans and Neanderthals interbred to between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago. Based on the genomes of living people, researchers had previously estimated they interbred between 36,000 and 80,000 years ago. Sequencing ancient DNA in this fashion allows scientists to peer back in time and observe breeding events as they happened, rather than infer what may have happened based on the genomes of contemporary humans[6].
Whilst the Ust’-Ishim man carried a similar amount of Neanderthal DNA as contemporary Eurasians, his were packaged in longer segments. As genetic information is passed from one generation to another, segments of DNA break up and recombine, meaning younger Eurasians would have shorter section of Neanderthal DNA, and “the closer you get to that interbreeding time period, the longer the Neanderthal pieces of chromosomes become”[7].
The results also provide insights into migration patterns as early humans moved out of Africa and across central Asia. One theory suggested that an early coastal migration from Africa gave rise to people now living in Oceania, and a second wave of people from Africa gave rise to Europeans and mainland Asians[8]. But the existence of a 45,000 year old man from Siberia, who is not more closely related to the descendants of either group suggest there may have been another group that migrated through central and east Asia, said the research team.
Genetic evidence now also suggests that a particular gene, microcephalin (a gene that regulates brain and head size characterised by a severely diminished brain and various neurological symptoms) split off from our evolutionary lineage a million years ago, and then jumped back in 40,000 years ago, leading to the inference that the newer version of the gene evolved in a separate species of human - probably Neanderthals - and then entered our lineage (introgressed) through interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans. Once in the human gene pool, the new variant was selectively favoured and now represents about 70 per cent of the worldwide frequency.[9]
Or is the genetic mix simply because we share a common ancestor?
On the other hand, a British study conducted before the Svante Paablo’s 2014 findings in relation to Ust’-Ishim man disputes the fact that inter-species mating (hybridisation) between Neanderhals and humans occurred, and states that if it happened at all, it was minimal. According to this view, sharing a common ancestor is more likely to be the reason behind genetic similarities between the two species, and the existence of a 500,000 year old common ancestry that predates the origin of Neanderthals provides a better explanation for the genetic mix. Diversity between this ancestral species meant that northern Africans were more genetically similar to their European counterparts than southern Africans through geographic proximity. This likeness persisted over time to account for the overlap with the Neanderthal genome we see in modern people today.
The authors discounted the 2010 study which suggested that interspecies liaisons near the Middle East resulted in Neanderthal genes first entering humans more than 70,000 years ago, this being supposedly the reason why modern non-Africans share more with Neanderthals than Africans. But the new study authors are of the view that Northern Africans would be more similar to Europeans and similarity stayed because there wasn’t enough mixing between northern and southern Africans. Whilst hybridisation can never be ruled out entirely, the less the significance attributable to it, the more unlikely it is that it would have shaped the ways modern humans evolved, they said[10].
The El Sidron Neanderthal cave bones, 43,000 yrs old, discovered March 1994 – the FOXP2 gene
As a prelude to these recent findings, in March 1994 140 Neanderthal bones were found in a cave system in northern Spain called El Sidrón, in the province of Asturias, just south of the Bay of Biscay. They turned out to be the fossilised remains of a group of Neanderthals who lived, and perhaps died violently, approximately 43,000 years ago. Two El Sidrón individuals appeared to share, with modern humans, a version of a gene called FOXP2 that contributes to speech and language ability, acting not only in the brain but also on the nerves that control facial muscles[11]. Whether Neanderthals were capable of sophisticated language abilities or a more primitive form of vocal communication (singing, for example) remains unclear, but the new genetic findings suggest they possessed some of the same vocalising hardware as modern humans.
However, on a more general note, other parts of the Neanderthal genome appear to contrast with ours in significant ways. For example, Neanderthals seem to have carried different versions of other genes involved in language, including CNTNAP2. Furthermore, of the 87 genes in modern humans that differ significantly from their counterparts in Neanderthals and another hominim group whom we have yet to meet, the Denisovans, several are involved in brain development and function, raising speculation as to whether or not differences in DNA sequence and gene activity translate to differences in cognition, and here intriguing clues have emerged from studies of those people today who carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA as a result of long-ago interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens[12].
Genetic experiments carried out by geneticist John Blangero of the Texas Biomedical Research Institute on hundreds of patients who still carry a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA today, suggest that several key brain regions were smaller in Neanderthals than modern humans, including the gray matter surface area (which helps to process information in the brain), Broca’s area (which seems to be involved in language) and the amygdala (which controls emotions and motivation), leading to the conclusion that Neanderthals were almost certainly less cognitively adept than early modern humans[13]. However, these findings are the subject of dispute, John Hanks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison saying pithily: “We know next to nothing about Neanderthal cognition from genetics because we know next to nothing about (modern) human cognition from genetics”[14].
Other Neanderthal fossil finds, 38,000 yrs ago Vindija; Krapinna (Croatia); 130,000 – 120,000 yrs ago; Uzbekistan, Siberia; La Quina (Spain) 75,000 – 40,000 yrs ago: Qafzeh Israeel) 90,000 yrs ago
It has since been possible to work out the entire three-billion-letter sequence of the Neanderthal genome[15], most of the evidence coming from the Croatian specimen, a 38,000-year-old fragment of leg bone found almost 30 years ago in the Vindija cave. Mitochondrial DNA has also been extracted from two fossils of uncertain origin excavated in Uzbekistan and southern Siberia. Both had a uniquely Neanderthal genetic signature. While the Uzbekistan specimen, a young boy, had long been considered a Neanderthal, the Siberian specimen was a surprise, extending the known Neanderthal range some 1,200 miles east of their European stronghold.
[1] Kate Wong, “Neandertal Minds (sic), Scientific American, February 2013, 26 at 33.
[2] Something like 2.5% in the case of Eurasians and North and South Americans and the Australian aborigines: Jamie Schreeve, “The case of the missing ancestor”, National Geographic, July 2013, 90 at 99-100; see also Kate Wong, "Last Hominin standing", Scientific American, September 2018, at 61(Neanderthal DNA makes up some 2% of the genome of Eurasions; Denisovan DNA up to 5% of the DNA of Melanesians).
[3] “Neanderthal genome reveals interbreeding with humans”, New Scientist, 6 May 2010 by Ewen Callaway.
[3.1] The colourful description of Professor Alice Roberts from the University of Birmingham in the BBC documentary The Lost Tribes of Humanity (2016) (fn [4] at the bottom of the page), whose own DNA is 2.7 Neanderthal.
[4] Kate Wong, op cit 29.
[5] Nicky Phillips, “Scientists sequence genome of 45,000 year-old man”, SMH, 23 October 2014. The findings of the team were published in the journal Nature.
[6] Per Jeremy Austin, Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide who was not involved in the research, cited in Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] See generally “The Neanderthal within”, New Scientist, 3 March 2007. Dan Jones. See also David Frayer’s comment “We swamped their gene pool” cited in Kate Wong. Neandertal Minds (sic)”, Scientific American, February 2015, 26 at 33, noted further on.
[10] Mehreen Khan, “Neanderthals shared ancestor with humans”, SMH, Health and Science, 16 August 2012. Researchers from the University of Cambridge are responsible for the paper which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[11] See above, page 15, in relation to the presence of this same gene in chimps, mice and humans.
[12] Kate Wong, op cit, 30.
[13] Ibid at 29 and 31.
[14] Ibid at 31.
[15] Once again, courtesy of Svante Paabo and his team, see Jamie Schreeve, “The case of the missing ancestor”, National Geographic, July 2013, 90 at 95-6.
So, while the new genetic evidence appears to confirm that Neanderthals were a separate species from us, it also suggests that they may have possessed human language and were successful over a far larger sweep of Eurasia than previously thought. There have also since been unearthed two jawbones of Neanderthal juveniles in Krapina, Croatia, dating back 130,000 to 120,000 years; the so-called La Quina skull from a Neanderthal youth, discovered in France and dating from between 75,000 to 40,000 years ago; and two striking 90,000-year-old modern human specimens, teeth intact, found in a rock shelter called Qafzeh in Israel, one pictured below:
Lack of “social buffering” may have been a factor leading to their decline
Other factors in the Neanderthal decline and extinction include the fact that they lacked the “social buffering” of support within large social groups. Like earlier hominines, they seem to have lived primarily in small family groups with limited contact with each other
In early human communities there was a more pronounced division of labour, the men hunting the larger animals and the women and younger children foraging for small game and plant foods, leading to a more diverse social diet.
Climate change and the end of the Neanderthals: Gorham’s cave, Rock of Gibralter, 28,000 yrs ago.
And then there was the all important factor of climate change. Ice core data suggests that from about 30,000 years ago until the last glacial maximum about 18,000 years ago, the Earth's climate fluctuated wildly. Neanderthal numbers diminished to pockets across the continent, until their last known remnants perished in a limestone cave known as Gorham's Cave opening to the sea on the Rock of Gibraltar, where there is evidence of inhabitation going back 125,000 years, including stone spearpoints and scrapers, charred pine nuts, and the remains of ancient hearths. Radiocarbon dating suggests that the embers in some of those fireplaces died out only 28,000 years ago—the last known trace of Neanderthals on Earth.
When the Ice Age reached this area between, 30,000 and 23,000 years ago, the landscape was transformed into a semiarid steppe, leading to the conclusion that it was not so much the arrival of modern humans, who were undoubtedly more efficient at food gathering and multiplied at a faster rate, as the dramatic shifts in climate that pushed the Iberian Neanderthals to the brink. But the lights had been going out on the Neanderthals all across Asia, Europe and the Middle East long before that, in Mongolia, Israel, Italy and Spain. So it was no so much one cataclysmic event, but a collection of related, but unique, short stories of extinction. Gibraltar was simply the last hurrah.
Were Neanderthals really as cognitively challenged as they are given debit for?
As we have seen, the suggestion has frequently been made that Neanderthals were supplanted by early modern humans lost out to because they lacked the language and social skills, the technological ingenuity and foraging skills possessed by the latter. However, evidence accumulated since the 1990’s suggests that more than 50,000 years ago and quite independently of modern humans Neanderhtls invented specialised bone tools to smooth and prepare animal hides. An international team of archaeologists uncovered four bone tools, known as lissoirs and made from deer ribs, in two well-known Neanderthal sites in the Dordogne region of south-western France dating back to between 53,000 and 41,000 years ago. The age of the bones preceded the earliest evidence of modern humans in that part of Europe by several thousand years. And when Neanderthals came into contact with homo sapiens several thousand years later, it was the modern humans who borrowed the technology off them[1], or at least that is the suggestion. The sites which predated the arrival of early modern humans and those where the two species overlapped are succinctly resumed in the diagram below.
Some of the most surprising discoveries reveal aesthetics and abstract thought in Neanderthal cultures that predated the arrival of H. sapiens: at Gorham’s cave, Italy’s Veneto region (signs of leather use, a stained fossil shell suspended on a string and worn as a pendant at least 47,600 years ago), Maastricht- Belvedere in the Netherlands (indications of painting dating back to 250,000 to 200,000 years ago) and Cueva de los Aviones and Cueva Anton in South Eastern Spain (seashells bearing traces of pigment) for example. In other words, herewith lay evidence of body decoration and symbolic thinking, one of the defining traits of modern humans seen as critical to our success as a species - and tools – the lissoirs mentioned above. This aspect is also explored by Professor Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum in the BBC Documentary The Lost Tribes of Humanity (2016) [2], and recent finds suggest that the Neandethals may have intentionally buried their dead, adorned themselves with feathers, painted their bodies with black and red pigments, and consumed a more varied diet than had previously been supposed.[3]
[1] Nicky Phillips, “Bone fragments reveal Neanderthals invented leather tool still used today”, SMH, 13 August 2013.
[2] www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07z8034/products
[3] Neanderthal "artwork" found in Gibraltar cave: www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28967746
Other factors in the Neanderthal decline and extinction include the fact that they lacked the “social buffering” of support within large social groups. Like earlier hominines, they seem to have lived primarily in small family groups with limited contact with each other
In early human communities there was a more pronounced division of labour, the men hunting the larger animals and the women and younger children foraging for small game and plant foods, leading to a more diverse social diet.
Climate change and the end of the Neanderthals: Gorham’s cave, Rock of Gibralter, 28,000 yrs ago.
And then there was the all important factor of climate change. Ice core data suggests that from about 30,000 years ago until the last glacial maximum about 18,000 years ago, the Earth's climate fluctuated wildly. Neanderthal numbers diminished to pockets across the continent, until their last known remnants perished in a limestone cave known as Gorham's Cave opening to the sea on the Rock of Gibraltar, where there is evidence of inhabitation going back 125,000 years, including stone spearpoints and scrapers, charred pine nuts, and the remains of ancient hearths. Radiocarbon dating suggests that the embers in some of those fireplaces died out only 28,000 years ago—the last known trace of Neanderthals on Earth.
When the Ice Age reached this area between, 30,000 and 23,000 years ago, the landscape was transformed into a semiarid steppe, leading to the conclusion that it was not so much the arrival of modern humans, who were undoubtedly more efficient at food gathering and multiplied at a faster rate, as the dramatic shifts in climate that pushed the Iberian Neanderthals to the brink. But the lights had been going out on the Neanderthals all across Asia, Europe and the Middle East long before that, in Mongolia, Israel, Italy and Spain. So it was no so much one cataclysmic event, but a collection of related, but unique, short stories of extinction. Gibraltar was simply the last hurrah.
Were Neanderthals really as cognitively challenged as they are given debit for?
As we have seen, the suggestion has frequently been made that Neanderthals were supplanted by early modern humans lost out to because they lacked the language and social skills, the technological ingenuity and foraging skills possessed by the latter. However, evidence accumulated since the 1990’s suggests that more than 50,000 years ago and quite independently of modern humans Neanderhtls invented specialised bone tools to smooth and prepare animal hides. An international team of archaeologists uncovered four bone tools, known as lissoirs and made from deer ribs, in two well-known Neanderthal sites in the Dordogne region of south-western France dating back to between 53,000 and 41,000 years ago. The age of the bones preceded the earliest evidence of modern humans in that part of Europe by several thousand years. And when Neanderthals came into contact with homo sapiens several thousand years later, it was the modern humans who borrowed the technology off them[1], or at least that is the suggestion. The sites which predated the arrival of early modern humans and those where the two species overlapped are succinctly resumed in the diagram below.
Some of the most surprising discoveries reveal aesthetics and abstract thought in Neanderthal cultures that predated the arrival of H. sapiens: at Gorham’s cave, Italy’s Veneto region (signs of leather use, a stained fossil shell suspended on a string and worn as a pendant at least 47,600 years ago), Maastricht- Belvedere in the Netherlands (indications of painting dating back to 250,000 to 200,000 years ago) and Cueva de los Aviones and Cueva Anton in South Eastern Spain (seashells bearing traces of pigment) for example. In other words, herewith lay evidence of body decoration and symbolic thinking, one of the defining traits of modern humans seen as critical to our success as a species - and tools – the lissoirs mentioned above. This aspect is also explored by Professor Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum in the BBC Documentary The Lost Tribes of Humanity (2016) [2], and recent finds suggest that the Neandethals may have intentionally buried their dead, adorned themselves with feathers, painted their bodies with black and red pigments, and consumed a more varied diet than had previously been supposed.[3]
[1] Nicky Phillips, “Bone fragments reveal Neanderthals invented leather tool still used today”, SMH, 13 August 2013.
[2] www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07z8034/products
[3] Neanderthal "artwork" found in Gibraltar cave: www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28967746
Source, Kate Wong, “The Homo Sapiens effect”, in “Neandertal(sic) minds”, Scientific American, February 2015, 26 at 30.
Improved dating techniques have been able to pinpoint the ages of dozens of Neanderthal and early modern European sites from Spain to Russia, indicating that the two groups shared the continent for some 2,600 to 5,400 years before the Neanderthals finally disappeared around 39,000 years ago. This lengthy overlap would have allowed plenty of time for mating between the two factions.
They went extinct because we swamped their gene pool and/or because early humans gave them their diseases
This leads to another theory about why the Neanderthals failed to survive as a species. As we have already seen, DNA analyses have found that people today who live outside Africa carry an average of at least 1.5 to 2.1% Neanderthal DNA, a legacy from dalliances between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans tens of thousands of years ago after the latter group began spreading out of Africa[1]. Maybe, some experts suggest, mixing between the smaller Neanderthal population and the larger one led to the Neanderthals’ eventual demise by swamping their gene pool, causing them to fade out, which of course is not necessarily a sign that they were stupid or culturally or adaptively incapable. It’s just what happens: “the history of all living forms is that they go extinct”[2]
Another reason advanced more recently which may have been at least a contributing factor is that the Neanderthals went extinct because of infectious diseases carried by humans who left Africa and made their way to Europe, carrying with them a significant reservoir of tropical diseases[3]. There is no hard evidence for this. Rather do the researchers asset that the diseases must have been transferred, given the timeline and geography of human migration and what the pathogen genomes tell us about the ancestry of disease. Remember also that humans and Neanderthals interacted and even mated with each other all of 60,000 years ago, a factor already mentioned on several occasions. Tapeworms, the genital herpes virus and tuberculosis may have all made their way into Europe, courtesy of humans, according to the paper.
The research suggests that some infectious diseases are actually much older than previously believed. Helicobacter pylori, which causes stomach ulcers, is estimated to have first infected humans in Africa at least 88,000 years ago and first arrived in Europe 52,000 years ago. Herpes simplex 2 was transmitted from unknown hominins to humans 1.6 million years ago, the virus’s genome suggests. Neanderthals went extinct before the human transition to an agrarian lifestyle 1.6 million years ago, but the ancestors of pathogens preceded the disease explosion which followed early human close interaction with animals during the agrarian revolution.
Neanderthals tended to congregate in small groups of from 15 to 30, so disease would have broken out sporadically and wouldn’t have been able to spread too far, says the paper. “A combination of factors contributed to the Neanderthal downfall, and evidence is building that spread of disease was an important one”, concludes Charlotte Houldcroft of Cambridge’s Division of Biological Anthropology, the lead author of the paper. “It is more likely that small bands of Neanderthals each had their own infection disasters, weakening the group and tipping the balance against survival”. In any event, however it occurred, what the demise of the Neanderthals does tell us is that "you can be an intelligent large brained hominid and still go extinct". [4] A lesson lies there for our own species!
[1] Kate Wong, op cit, February 2015, 26 at 33.
[2] Professor David Frayer of the University of Kansas cited in ibid at 33.
[3] According to researchers at Cambridge an Oxford Brookes universities who analysed ancient DNA and pathogen genomes and published theire findings in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. This summary of their findings is drawn from Elahe Izadi’s account in the Washington Post on 12 April 2016 and reproduced in turn in the Sydney Morning Herald.
[4] Professor Clive Finlayson of the Gibraltar Museum, BBC documentary The Lost Tribes of Humanity (2016) presented by Professor Alice Roberts of the University of Birmingham at
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07z8034/products