Two old sayings, and very true, and probably as old as humanity. What would our ancestors have said when Neanderthals and Cro-Magnans crossed paths. "Owowoh Baby, I love your protruding brow ridges." "Wooo fella, your flat face just makes me want to jump up and down!" Evidently some couple got the hots for each other around 30,000 years ago. Food for thought. Enjoy the read.
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Chance and isolation gave humans elegant skulls
- 24 July 2007
- NewScientist.com news service
Only chance kept us from looking like our crag-browed Neanderthal cousins. A statistical analysis suggests that the skull differences between the two species stems not from positive natural selection but from genetic drift, in which physical features change randomly, without an environmental driving force.
Some anthropologists had put the cranial differences down to natural selection arising from Neanderthals' use of their teeth as tools, for instance, or from modern humans' speech. To test if genetic drift could have been responsible instead, Timothy Weaver of the University of California, Davis, and colleagues compared 37 measurements of the skulls of various modern human populations with those of Neanderthals. After a comparison of the mean divergence between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals and the mean divergence among groups of modern humans, they conclude that genetic drift is responsible (Journal of Human Evolution, DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2007.03.001).
The development of culture weakened the influence of the environment upon both Neanderthals and modern humans, says Weaver. But ultimately the two species drifted apart genetically when they became isolated from each other.
Neanderthal Reconstruction
| Neandertal-Cro-Magnon Hybrid? | April 29, 1999 |
| by Spencer P.M. Harrington | |
![[image]](#//www.archaeology.org/image.php?page=online/news/jpegs/neanderkid.jpeg')) | Analysis of the skeletal remains of this four-year-old boy has revealed that he may be a Neandertal-Cro-Magnon hybrid. (Courtesy João Zilhão) [LARGER IMAGE] |
Analysis of the skeletal remains of a four-year-old child buried in a Portuguese rock-shelter 25,000 to 24,500 years ago has yielded startling evidence that early modern humans and Neandertals may have interbred. While the boy's prominent chin, tooth size, and pelvic measurements marked him as a Cro-Magnon, or fully modern human, his stocky body and short legs indicate Neandertal heritage, says Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Interbreeding could answer the vexed question of the fate of the Neandertals, the last of whom disappeared from the Iberian Peninsula 28,000 years ago.
Cro-MagnonTrinkaus was summoned to Portugal after archaeologists searching for rock art in the Lapedo Valley, 85 miles north of Lisbon, found the burial this past December. João Zilhão of the University of Lisbon, the excavation's director, described the skeleton's preservation as "miraculous"--only the skull and right arm were badly broken. The boy is the first Palaeolithic burial ever excavated on the Iberian Peninsula, and among the oldest modern humans ever scientifically excavated.
Trinkaus, who compared the boy's limb proportions with those of Neandertal skeletons, including some children, says that the body is the first definite evidence of a mixture between Neandertal and early humans. While full Neandertals are thought to have been extinct for 4,000 years before the boy was born, he appears to be a descendant of generations of Neandertal-Cro-Magnon hybrids. Neandertals belong to our species and contributed their genes to European ancestry, he says.
 © 1999 by the Archaeological Institute of America www.archaeology.org/online/news/neanderkid.html |
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