̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Neanderthal

Revealed: face of 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal from cave where species buried their dead

fpjl2 — Thu, 02 May 2024 06:46:45 +0000

A new documentary has recreated the face of a 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal whose flattened skull was discovered and rebuilt from hundreds of bone fragments by a team of archaeologists and conservators led by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Shanidar Z: what did Neanderthals do with their dead?

fpjl2 — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 12:11:16 +0000

Archaeologists have unearthed a Neanderthal skeleton in a famous cave in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Opinion: No giant leap for mankind: why we’ve been looking at human evolution in the wrong way

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Jun 2016 13:21:45 +0000

Understanding exactly how and why humans evolved is clearly one of the most important goals in science. But despite a significant amount of research to date, these questions have remained a bit of a mystery. Of course, there is no shortage of theories – it has even been suggested that humans are just visiting aliens. However, most of the credible models tend to take something that is unique to humans – such as language – and show how all the other bits of being human derive from that.

But focusing on one dramatic change as an evolutionary driver in this way may not be the best approach to understanding our past. ̽��ֱ��question was discussed in a series of papers in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

Hunting is a good example, as it is often used to explain human evolution. We eat far more meat than other primates – most of them are in fact entirely vegetarian. It has therefore been argued that meat was the high quality resource that allowed humans to evolve large and complex brains.

What’s more, it takes communication, cooperation and technology (those stone tools came in handy) to acquire it, so hunting could also explain a number of other typically human traits. Eating large animals also could also taught humans to share, leading to social cohesion and interdependence. Hunting is just one of many models that have been proposed to explain human uniqueness and cultural complexity – language, fire, cooking and grandmothers, who enhanced human success by investing in their daughters children instead of having more themselves.

Vince Smith/Flickr, CC BY-SA

̽��ֱ��problem with these theories is that they depend on evolution being a sort of one-step game, where one change produces a great leap forward, one from which other changes cascade. But the record does not support this. We split from our last common ancestor with the chimpanzees 5-6m years ago. But when we look at human ancestors between then and now, we do not find a single moment of dramatic change. Instead, it was cumulative – some 4m years ago we started walking upright on two legs, and about a million years later we started using stone tools. ̽��ֱ��size of our brains only started enlarging about 2m years ago.

Certainly there were periods that involved a more dynamic series of changes than others. For example, there was one at the beginning based on how hominins moved across the landscape, becoming bipedal and ranging over larger areas. Then about 2-3m years ago, there was another period of changes when brain size started to increase and childhood and adolescence periods started getting longer. This was coupled with boosts in technology and resource acquisition, such as hunting and gathering.

A final such period occurred in the last half million years, when cognitive changes associated with language, cooperation and cumulative culture – such as the development of more complex and composite technology, and the use of material culture for symbolic purposes – came to the fore. But even these periods, each lasting hundreds of thousands of years, were multi-event processes.

̽��ֱ��big picture

As far as we can tell, human evolution is like a mosaic of change, made up of many small steps, each of which adds a piece to what it is to be human. Only at the end do we see the full configuration, but had we stopped the clock at any point along that continuum, we would have seen a different mosaic. Human evolution is not one great transition, therefore, but many smaller ones.

Part of the problem in trying to see the big pattern of human evolution is that we look at it through the lens of the present – how we are today is the guide to how we were in the past. But the past was different in so many ways, and our extinct relatives show some surprising departures from what we expect when we base those expectations on ourselves.

̽��ֱ��remains of a Neanderthal wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Take body size. In the developed world, we are big, and sadly getting bigger in unhealthy ways. Better nutrition has led to increased body mass in many populations across the world. We also associate being large with being human, as it was thought that our ultimate ancestors, the australopithecines (living in Africa between about 4m and 2m years ago) were small, and that our own genus, Homo, marked a substantial increase in body size.

But that may not have been the case. In fact, nearly all the early, extinct species and subspecies of Homo were small, if not very small. ̽��ֱ��global average human body weight (combined sexes) now is over 60kg. No fossil hominin until the Neanderthals and modern humans reached an average of 50 kg, and most were below 40 kg – half the size of the average American male. Pygmy populations in Africa and Asia also weigh about 40kg, which means that most early and extinct hominins were pygmy sized. There are many advantages to large body size – such as resisting predators, access to larger prey – and the fact that our earliest ancestors did not become large tells us a lot about the energetic constraints under which they lived and reproduced.

We may picture our ancestors as rugged versions of ourselves, tall and strong, but they were not. We need to start thinking of them as creatures that were as unique as ourselves, but in different ways.

Understanding more about human evolution will depend on finding more fossils and applying more and more powerful scientific techniques. Ancient DNA, for example, is revealing extraordinary new details about our recent past. As important, however, will be using our greater knowledge of the overall pattern of human evolution, its tempo and mode, to inform us about the cumulative processes by which we became human, rather than expecting that with one great evolutionary bound, our hero was free.

Robert Foley, Professor of Human Evolution, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Robert Foley (Department of Archaeology and Anthropology) discusses the cumulative processes by which we became human.

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Australopithecus afarensis reconstruction

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Neanderthals may have been infected by diseases carried out of Africa by humans, say researchers

fpjl2 — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 08:23:09 +0000

A 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.

There is evidence that our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals and exchanged genes associated with disease. There is also evidence that viruses moved into humans from other hominins while still in Africa. So, the researchers argue, it makes sense to assume that humans could, in turn, pass disease to Neanderthals, and that – if we were mating with them – we probably did.

Dr Charlotte Houldcroft, from Cambridge’s Division of Biological Anthropology, says that many of the infections likely to have passed from humans to Neanderthals – such as tapeworm, tuberculosis, stomach ulcers and types of herpes – are chronic diseases that would have weakened the hunter-gathering Neanderthals, making them less fit and able to find food, which could have catalysed extinction of the species.

“Humans migrating out of Africa would have been a significant reservoir of tropical diseases,” says Houldcroft. “For the Neanderthal population of Eurasia, adapted to that geographical infectious disease environment, exposure to new pathogens carried out of Africa may have been catastrophic.”

“However, it is unlikely to have been similar to Columbus bringing disease into America and decimating native populations. It’s more likely that small bands of Neanderthals each had their own infection disasters, weakening the group and tipping the balance against survival,” says Houldcroft.

New techniques developed in the last few years mean researchers can now peer into the distant past of modern disease by unravelling its genetic code, as well as extracting DNA from fossils of some of our earliest ancestors to detect traces of disease.

In a paper published today in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, Houldcroft, who also studies modern infections at Great Ormond Street Hospital, and Dr Simon Underdown, a researcher in human evolution from Oxford Brookes ̽��ֱ��, write that genetic data shows many infectious diseases have been “co-evolving with humans and our ancestors for tens of thousands to millions of years”.

̽��ֱ��longstanding view of infectious disease is that it exploded with the dawning of agriculture some 8,000 years ago, as increasingly dense and sedentary human populations coexisted with livestock, creating a perfect storm for disease to spread. ̽��ֱ��researchers say the latest evidence suggests disease had a much longer “burn in period” that pre-dates agriculture.

In fact, they say that many diseases traditionally thought to be ‘zoonoses’, transferred from herd animals into humans, such as tuberculosis, were actually transmitted into the livestock by humans in the first place.

“We are beginning to see evidence that environmental bacteria were the likely ancestors of many pathogens that caused disease during the advent of agriculture, and that they initially passed from humans into their animals,” says Houldcroft.

“Hunter-gatherers lived in small foraging groups. Neanderthals lived in groups of between 15-30 members, for example. So disease would have broken out sporadically, but have been unable to spread very far. Once agriculture came along, these diseases had the perfect conditions to explode, but they were already around.”

There is as yet no hard evidence of infectious disease transmission between humans and Neanderthals; however, considering the overlap in time and geography, and not least the evidence of interbreeding, Houldcroft and Underdown say that it must have occurred.

Neanderthals would have adapted to the diseases of their European environment. There is evidence that humans benefited from receiving genetic components through interbreeding that protected them from some of these: types of bacterial sepsis – blood poisoning occurring from infected wounds – and encephalitis caught from ticks that inhabit Siberian forests.

In turn, the humans, unlike Neanderthals, would have been adapted to African diseases, which they would have brought with them during waves of expansion into Europe and Asia.

̽��ֱ��researchers describe Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that causes stomach ulcers, as a prime candidate for a disease that humans may have passed to Neanderthals. It is estimated to have first infected humans in Africa 88 to 116 thousand years ago, and arrived in Europe after 52,000 years ago. ̽��ֱ��most recent evidence suggests Neanderthals died out around 40,000 years ago.

Another candidate is herpes simplex 2, the virus which causes genital herpes. There is evidence preserved in the genome of this disease that suggests it was transmitted to humans in Africa 1.6 million years ago from another, currently unknown hominin species that in turn acquired it from chimpanzees.

“ ̽��ֱ��‘intermediate’ hominin that bridged the virus between chimps and humans shows that diseases could leap between hominin species. ̽��ֱ��herpesvirus is transmitted sexually and through saliva. As we now know that humans bred with Neanderthals, and we all carry 2-5% of Neanderthal DNA as a result, it makes sense to assume that, along with bodily fluids, humans and Neanderthals transferred diseases,” says Houldcroft.

Recent theories for the cause of Neanderthal extinction range from climate change to an early human alliance with wolves resulting in domination of the food chain. “It is probable that a combination of factors caused the demise of Neanderthals,” says Houldcroft, “and the evidence is building that spread of disease was an important one.”

Inset image: Dr Charlotte Houldcroft

Review of latest genetic evidence suggests infectious diseases are tens of thousands of years older than previously thought, and that they could jump between species of ‘hominin’. Researchers says that humans migrating out of Africa would have been ‘reservoirs of tropical disease’ – disease that may have sped up Neanderthal extinction.

Humans migrating out of Africa would have been a significant reservoir of tropical diseases

Charlotte Houldcroft

Erich Ferdinand

Neanderthal man

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‘Virtual fossil’ reveals last common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals

fpjl2 — Fri, 18 Dec 2015 10:15:31 +0000

We know we share a common ancestor with Neanderthals, the extinct species that were our closest prehistoric relatives. But what this ancient ancestral population looked like remains a mystery, as fossils from the Middle Pleistocene period, during which the lineage split, are extremely scarce and fragmentary.

Now, researchers have applied digital “morphometrics” and statistical algorithms to cranial fossils from across the evolutionary story of both species, and recreated in 3D the skull of the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals for the first time.

̽��ֱ��“virtual fossil” has been simulated by plotting a total of 797 “landmarks” on the cranium of fossilised skulls stretching over almost two million years of Homo history – including a 1.6 million-year-old Homo erectus fossil, Neanderthal crania found in Europe and even 19th century skulls from the Duckworth collection in Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��landmarks on these samples provided an evolutionary framework from which researchers could predict a timeline for the skull structure, or ‘morphology’, of our ancient ancestors. They then fed a digitally-scanned modern skull into the timeline, warping the skull to fit the landmarks as they shifted through history.

This allowed researchers to work out how the morphology of both species may have converged in the last common ancestor’s skull during the Middle Pleistocene – an era dating from approximately 800,000 to 100,000 years ago.

̽��ֱ��team generated three possible ancestral skull shapes that corresponded to three different predicted split times between the two lineages. They digitally rendered complete skulls and then compared them to the few original fossils and bone fragments of the Pleistocene age.

This enabled the researchers to narrow down which virtual skull was the best fit for the ancestor we share with Neanderthals, and which timeframe was most likely for that last common ancestor to have existed.

Previous estimates based on ancient DNA have predicted the last common ancestor lived around 400,000 years ago. However, results from the ‘virtual fossil’ show the ancestral skull morphology closest to fossil fragments from the Middle Pleistocene suggests a lineage split of around 700,000 years ago, and that – while this ancestral population was also present across Eurasia – the last common ancestor most likely originated in Africa.

̽��ֱ��results of the study are published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

“We know we share a common ancestor with Neanderthals, but what did it look like? And how do we know the rare fragments of fossil we find are truly from this past ancestral population? Many controversies in human evolution arise from these uncertainties,” said the study’s lead author Dr Aurélien Mounier, a researcher at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies (LCHES).

“We wanted to try an innovative solution to deal with the imperfections of the fossil record: a combination of 3D digital methods and statistical estimation techniques. This allowed us to predict mathematically and then recreate virtually skull fossils of the last common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals, using a simple and consensual ‘tree of life’ for the genus Homo,” he said.

̽��ֱ��virtual 3D ancestral skull bears early hallmarks of both species. For example, it shows the initial budding of what in Neanderthals would become the ‘occipital bun’: the prominent bulge at the back of the skull that contributed to elongated shape of a Neanderthal head.

However, the face of the virtual ancestor shows hints of the strong indention that modern humans have under the cheekbones, contributing to our more delicate facial features. In Neanderthals, this area – the maxillia – is ‘pneumatized’, meaning it was thicker bone due to more air pockets, so that the face of a Neanderthal would have protruded.

Research from New York ̽��ֱ�� published last week showed that bone deposits continued to build on the faces of Neanderthal children during the first years of their life.

̽��ֱ��heavy, thickset brow of the virtual ancestor is characteristic of the hominin lineage, very similar to early Homo as well as Neanderthal, but lost in modern humans. Mounier says the virtual fossil is more reminiscent of Neanderthals overall, but that this is unsurprising as taking the timeline as a whole it is Homo sapiens who deviate from the ancestral trajectory in terms of skull structure.

“ ̽��ֱ��possibility of a higher rate of morphological change in the modern human lineage suggested by our results would be consistent with periods of major demographic change and genetic drift, which is part of the history of a species that went from being a small population in Africa to more than seven billion people today,” said co-author Dr Marta Mirazón Lahr, also from Cambridge’s LCHES.

̽��ֱ��population of last common ancestors was probably part of the species Homo heidelbergensis in its broadest sense, says Mounier. This was a species of Homo that lived in Africa, Europe and western Asia between 700,000 and 300,000 years ago.

For their next project, Mounier and colleagues have started working on a model of the last common ancestor of Homo and chimpanzees. “Our models are not the exact truth, but in the absence of fossils these new methods can be used to test hypotheses for any palaeontological question, whether it is horses or dinosaurs,” he said.

LCA1 by ferl3 on Sketchfab

New digital techniques have allowed researchers to predict structural evolution of the skull in the lineage of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, in an effort to fill in blanks in the fossil record, and provide the first 3D rendering of their last common ancestor. ̽��ֱ��study suggests populations that led to the lineage split were older than previously thought.

Our models are not the exact truth, but in the absence of fossils these new methods can be used to test hypotheses for any palaeontological question, whether it is horses or dinosaurs

Aurélien Mounier

‘Virtual fossil’ reveals last common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals

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Scientists use genetics and climate reconstructions to track the global spread of modern humans out of Africa

bjb42 — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:00:36 +0000

By integrating genetics with high resolution historical climate reconstructions, scientists have been able to predict the timing and routes taken by modern humans during their expansion out of Africa. Their research reveals that the spread of humans out of Africa was dictated by climate, with their entry into Europe possibly delayed by competition with Neanderthals. ̽��ֱ��research is published today, 17 September, in the journal PNAS.

Dr Anders Eriksson, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, the lead author of the paper said: “By combining extensive genetic information with climate and vegetation models, we were able to build the most detailed reconstruction of human history so far.”

̽��ֱ��role of climate change in determining the timing of the expansion of human populations has been long debated. ̽��ֱ��oldest fossil remains of anatomically modern humans are found in Africa and date back to around 200 thousand years ago, but there is no trace outside Africa until 100 thousand years later.

̽��ֱ��newly published model provides the first direct link between climate change and the timing of the expansion out of Africa, as well as the routes taken.

To investigate the role of climate, the Cambridge scientists built a highly detailed model tracking the fate of all individuals on the planet. ̽��ֱ��project involved specialists from a variety of fields. Working together with climatologists and vegetation modellers, they reconstructed climate and sea level changes and their effect on food availability through time, with a resolution of 100km. After exploring several million demographic scenarios (e.g. birth rates, local movement rates, link between food availability and population sizes), they were able to identify the scenarios that were most compatible with the geographic patterns of genetic diversity in modern humans. Working with anthropologists and archaeologists, they were then able to compare these scenarios against the dates and localities of known archaeological and fossil finds.

̽��ֱ��demographic scenarios chosen by the model revealed a link between food availability and population density in the past was very similar to the link found in present day hunter-gatherers. Based on this link, the model found that climate prevented humans from exiting Africa until a favourable window appeared in North-East Africa approximately 70-55k years ago. Most movement occurred through the so-called Sothern Route, exiting Africa via the Bab-el-Mandeb strait into the Arabian Peninsula.

̽��ֱ��dating of the out-of-Africa exit as well as the arrival times for other continents identified by the model, were also found to largely agree with archaeological and fossil evidence, with the notable exception of Europe. For Europe, the model based on climate predicted arrival times approximately 10 thousand years earlier than the available archaeological evidence. This discrepancy could be explained by competition with Neanderthals, which was not accounted for in their model, and would likely have slowed down the colonization of Europe by modern humans.

Dr Manica, who co-led the study, said: “ ̽��ֱ��idea that we can reconstruct climate, and estimate food availability and finally figure out the demographic changes and movements of our ancestors all over the world is simply amazing. ̽��ֱ��fact that most of our results are in agreement with archaeological and anthropological evidence - which was not used to generate our model - points to the fact that our reconstructions based on genetics are quite realistic.”

̽��ֱ��research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the BBSRC.

Research indicates the out-of-Africa spread of humans was dictated by the appearance of favourable climatic windows.

̽��ֱ��idea that we can reconstruct climate, and estimate food availability and finally figure out the demographic changes and movements of our ancestors all over the world is simply amazing.

Andrea Manica

Andrea Manica.

Diagram showing spread of humans from Africa.

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Caveman about the house

bjb42 — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 05:00:38 +0000

Our extinct prehistoric cousins, the Neanderthals, may have spent less of their time living the rugged life of the hunter and more of it carrying out tedious domestic chores, a new study suggests.

Researchers investigated the causes of distinctive skeletal features that occur in Neanderthal remains. Compared with modern and most prehistoric Homo sapiens, Neanderthal skeletons have significantly overdeveloped right arms. In some cases, their upper arm bones are as much as 50% stronger on their right side than their left. By comparison, living humans display much lower levels of upper arm bone strength asymmetry at about 5-15%.

Biological anthropologists have previously argued that this was the result of right-handed Neanderthals using spears to hunt big game, which would have certainly been an activity critical to ensuring their survival in the variable climate of the Pleistocene epoch, from about 450,000 to 30,000 years ago.

̽��ֱ��new study suggests that Neanderthal skeletal asymmetry may have been the result of a less glamorous subsistence task. ̽��ֱ��paper, published in the journal PLOS One suggests that Neanderthals may have spent hours scraping animal hides using stone tools possibly for clothing production. That would have been an arduous and repetitive task, essential in the cold conditions in which they lived.

“ ̽��ֱ��asymmetry we see in the arms of Neanderthals is far more profound than anything we encounter in modern humans except some sportspeople, such as cricketers and tennis players”, Dr Colin Shaw, from the PAVE research group and the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, said.

“ ̽��ֱ��skeletal remains suggest that Neanderthals were doing something intense or repetitive, or both, that had a significant role in their lives. If it was hunting, it was taking up a great deal of their time. Not surprisingly, that theory has coloured our view of Neanderthal ‘the hunter’.”

“Our research moves away from that perspective. Hunting was an important part of the lives of Neanderthals. However, for much of their time Neanderthals might have been performing other tasks, such as preparing skins. If we are right, it changes our picture of the daily activities of Neanderthals.”

̽��ֱ��notion that the Neanderthal’s skeletal asymmetry might be the result of hunting became popular in the mid-1990s. ̽��ֱ��bones in question are the wrong cross-sectional shape to have developed as the result of repeatedly throwing spears, like a javelin. Experts have suggested, however, that they may have used spears two-handed and in an underarm motion, like a pool cue. Despite other convincing research, there had not been any tests of the musculature to examine this thesis, until now.

̽��ֱ��new study was carried out by a team of researchers from the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Penn State in the US. To measure the impact of repeated hide-scraping, and of a spear being used two-handed to kill game at close-quarters, the researchers carried out several tests in which groups of right-handed men were asked to carry out tasks replicating both activities.

̽��ֱ��impact on the upper arm was tested using a technique called electromyography, in which the electrical potential generated by muscles is measured during activity. ̽��ֱ��muscles analysed in this case were those at the shoulder and chest, which act as the primary movers of the humerus. Assessing their activity would provide a good indication of loads imposed upon the humerus (upper arm bone).

Surprisingly, they found that during two-handed spear thrusting tasks, the muscular activity was far higher in the left arm compared to the right. “It appears that because the left hand is the closest point of contact when the spear impacts the target,” said Shaw, “the reaction force is primarily countered by aspects of the musculoskeletal system on the left side of the body.”

By contrast, one-handed scraping tasks that simulated the processing of animal hides to be used as clothing required far more muscular activity on the right side of the body in precisely those areas which would lead to over-development of the upper-right arm. This suggests something other than hunting, and quite possibly the scraping of animal skins, was a task which occupied large amounts of the Neanderthals’ time, and influenced the unique morphology of their upper body.

̽��ֱ��idea that scraping animal hides was indeed a popular activity seems likely because Neanderthals would have required protective and warm clothing. One of the tools most commonly found with Neanderthal skeletal remains is the racloir, or ‘side-scraper’, a device used to scrape soft tissue from the underside of animal hides.

Although we have no way of knowing for sure how the Neanderthals made clothes, an educated guess can be made on the basis of ethnographic studies of traditional communities in places such as Ethiopia, British Columbia and Alaska, where animal hides are still prepared.

These studies have shown that processing animal skins is quite a laborious task, and even experienced individuals need about eight hours to scrape a single hide. Preparing several hides for each member of a community would have required exactly the sort of repetitious activity attested to by the overdeveloped right arms of Neanderthal skeletons.

̽��ֱ��researchers behind the new study admit that it can only go so far to explain the skeletal asymmetry. In ethnographic studies, for example, women rather than men are those who primarily prepare the animal hides. Insufficient numbers of female Neanderthal remains have been identified for a comparative study to be possible.

There is also the possibility that more Neanderthals than we think were left-handed. This seems unlikely, however. “We should always be tentative when making judgments about prehistory because any conclusions we draw are really inferences,” Shaw said. “About 90% of modern humans, however, are right-handed and that has been a dominant trend for at least 10,000 years. There is no obvious reason to suppose that Neanderthals were different.”

̽��ֱ��traditional image of Neanderthals as gritty people who spent most of their time out hunting might not be entirely accurate, according to a new study revealing that they may have had to devote hours to daily subsistence tasks instead.

If we are right, this changes our picture of the daily activities of Neanderthals.

Colin Shaw

Wikimedia Commons.

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Strength in numbers

gm349 — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 19:01:17 +0000

New research sheds light on why, after 300,000 years of domination, European Neanderthals abruptly disappeared. Researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge have discovered that modern humans coming from Africa swarmed the region, arriving with over ten times the population as the Neanderthal inhabitants.

̽��ֱ��reasons for the relatively sudden disappearance of the European Neanderthal populations across the continent around 40,000 years ago has for long remained one of the great mysteries of human evolution. After 300 millennia of living, and evidently flourishing, in the cold, sub–glacial environments of central and western Europe, they were rapidly replaced over all areas of the continent by new, anatomically and genetically ‘modern’ (i.e. Homo sapiens) populations who had originated and evolved in the vastly different tropical environments of Africa.

̽��ֱ��most plausible answer to this long-debated question has now been published today, 29 July, in the journal Science by two researchers from the Department of Archaeology at Cambridge – Professor Sir Paul Mellars, Professor Emeritus of Prehistory and Human Evolution, and Jennifer French, a second-year PhD student.

By conducting a detailed statistical analysis of the archaeological evidence from the classic ‘Perigord’ region of southwestern France, which contains the largest concentration of Neanderthal and early modern human sites in Europe, they have found clear evidence that the earliest modern human populations penetrated the region in at least ten times larger numbers than those of the local Neanderthal populations already established in the same regions. This is reflected in a sharp increase in the total number of occupied sites, much higher densities of occupation residues (i.e. stone tools and animal food remains) in the sites, and bigger areas of occupation in the sites, revealing the formation of much larger and apparently more socially integrated social groupings.

Faced with this dramatic increase in the incoming modern human population, the capacity of the local Neanderthal groups to compete for the same range of living sites, the same range of animal food supplies (principally reindeer, horse, bison and red deer), and the same scarce fuel supplies to tide the groups over the extremely harsh glacial winters, would have been massively undermined. Additionally, almost inevitably, repeated conflicts or confrontations between the two populations would arise for occupation of the most attractive locations and richest food supplies, in which the increased numbers and more highly coordinated activities of the modern human groups would ensure their success over the Neanderthal groups.

̽��ֱ��archaeological evidence also strongly suggests that the incoming modern groups possessed superior hunting technologies and equipment (e.g. more effective and long-range hunting spears), and probably more efficient procedures for processing and storing food supplies over the prolonged and exceptionally cold glacial winters. They also appear to have had more wide-ranging social contacts with adjacent human groups to allow for trade and exchange of essential food supplies in times of food scarcity.

Whether the incoming modern human groups also possessed more highly developed brains and associated mental capacities than the Neanderthals remains at present a matter of intense debate. But the sudden appearance of a wide range of complex and sophisticated art forms (including cave paintings), the large-scale production of elaborate decorative items (such as perforated stone and ivory beads, and imported sea shells), and clearly ‘symbolic’ systems of markings on bone and ivory tools – all entirely lacking among the preceding Neanderthals – strongly point to more elaborate systems of social communications among the modern groups, probably accompanied by more advanced and complex forms of language.

All of these new and more complex behavioural patterns can be shown to have developed first among the ancestral African Homo sapiens populations, at least 20,0000 to 30,000 years before their dispersal from Africa, and progressive colonisation (and replacement of earlier populations) across all regions of Europe and Asia from around 60,000 years onwards.

If, as the latest genetic evidence strongly suggests, the African Homo sapiens and European Neanderthal populations had been evolving separately for at least half a million years, then the emergence of some significant contrasts in the mental capacities of the two lineages would not be a particularly surprising development, in evolutionary terms.

Professor Sir Paul Mellars, Professor Emeritus of Prehistory and Human Evolution at the Department of Archaeology, said: “In any event, it was clearly this range of new technological and behavioural innovations which allowed the modern human populations to invade and survive in much larger population numbers than those of the preceding Neanderthals across the whole of the European continent. Faced with this kind of competition, the Neanderthals seem to have retreated initially into more marginal and less attractive regions of the continent and eventually – within a space of at most a few thousand years – for their populations to have declined to extinction – perhaps accelerated further by sudden climatic deterioration across the continent around 40,000 years ago.”

Whatever the precise cultural, behavioural and intellectual contrasts between the Neanderthals and intrusive modern human populations, this new study published in Science demonstrates for the first time the massive numerical supremacy of the earliest modern human populations in western Europe, compared with those of the preceding Neanderthals, and thereby largely resolves one of the most controversial and long-running debates over the rapid decline and extinction of the enigmatic Neanderthal populations.

Volume of modern humans infiltrating Europe cited as critical factor in the demise of the Neanderthals.

Faced with this kind of competition, the Neanderthals seem to have retreated initially into more marginal and less attractive regions of the continent and eventually – within a space of at most a few thousand years – for their populations to have declined to extinction – perhaps accelerated further by sudden climatic deterioration across the continent around 40,000 years ago.

Professor Sir Paul Mellars, Professor Emeritus of Prehistory and Human Evolution at the Department of Archaeology

Image Dora Kemp, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research

Map of the migration of modern man out of Africa. Triangles represent Aurignacian (considered the first modern humans) split-base points.

<p>[caption id="attachment_19297" align="alignnone" width="944" caption="Image credit: Dora Kemp, McDonald Institute for Archaeological ResearchImage credit: Dora Kemp, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research"]<a href="/%3Ca%20href%3D"http://news.admin.cam.ac.uk/research/news/strength-in-numbers/attachment/110728-mellars-map-2/">http://news.admin.cam.ac.uk/research/news/strength-in-numbers/attachment..." rel="attachment wp-att-19297"><img class="size-large wp-image-19297" title="Map of modern man migration. Triangles indicate Aurignacian (considered the first modern humans) split-base points." src="/%3Ca%20href%3D"http://news.admin.cam.ac.uk/research/files/2011/07/110728-Mellars-map1-944x531.jpg">http://news.admin.cam.ac.uk/research/files/2011/07/110728-Mellars-map1-9..." alt="" width="944" height="531" /></a>[/caption]</p>

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