WE HAVE MET US

I don't get why the writer seems to be scared of Neanderthals. I had always hoped they were still among us. Years ago, scientists used to say brain size was directly related to intelligence, the larger the brain, the higher the intelligence. That changed over the years, Neanderthal has a larger brain than we do, Dolphins have a larger brain, Whales. Of course with our 'great wisdom' they cannot be more intelligent than we are. I remember in Anthropology class, it was making and using tools is what made us superior, more intelligent.  That changed when researchers found Chimps modifying grass and sticks to use for gathering termites. Some birds use thorns to pick grubs out of wood, Sea Otters use stones to break open shell fish, etc etc.  Most pictures of Neanderthals show them as lumbering almost human beings, but some of the newest research shows we really wouldn't notice them if they were alive today.  They would fit in with the people on the street. As Solomon said long ago, it is vanity, all vanity. And we continue to wonder. . .John

 

The Scariest Thing about Neanderthals

By Meredith F. Small, LiveScience's Human Nature Columnist

posted: 02 November 2007 12:56 pm ET

 

Who knew the Weasley family trademark—a shock of bright red hair—was tens of thousands of years old?

Fictional wizards and J.K. Rowling aside, researchers Carles Lalueza-Fox of the University of Barcelona, Spain and Holger Rompler of the University of Leipzig in Germany announced last week that Neanderthals, who died out 35,000 years ago, had the same distribution of hair and skin color as modern human European populations. By inference, that means that about 1 percent of Neanderthals must have been redheads, with pale skin and freckles.

"Gibraltar I:
Reconstruction of a
ca. four-year-old
Neandertal"

The idea of Neanderthals with red hair and freckles is just plain charming. But it's also scary because it underscores the fact that Neanderthals were so much like us, and now they're gone.

Ever since their fossils were first discovered in 1829 (and later called "Neanderthal Man" by William King, who was part Irish, by the way), these hominids have been relegated to the status of cave men and women. Neanderthals were shorter and more muscular than the other humans living at the same time, had bigger noses and projecting brow ridges, and no chins. Not a pretty picture.

But these ancient fellow Europeans were also culturally sophisticated. They buried their dead, built shelters, made tools, used fire and hunted. The may have had language (DNA sequencing has also revealed they carried the FOXP2 gene which is linked to language ability). And they had brains 100 cubic centimeters larger than people today.

And so why have these interesting people been relegated to second-class citizen status?

Because they threaten us.

Neanderthals are chronologically the closest, and the most familiar, example that we have of our kind disappearing off the face of the Earth, and that means we can go too.

No one knows exactly why Neanderthals went extinct, but the possibilities are also troubling.

They may have been wiped out by disease or bad weather. Or overpopulated their habitat and run out of food, fuel, and decent water.

They may have once been the greatest society on Earth, but in their arrogance ignored the smaller-brained hominids (that would be us) on the other side of the hill and been caught off guard and slaughtered in the first genocide.

Perhaps Neanderthals were simply unable to adapt to changing times, unable to lift their blinders and see beyond their own borders to the march of humanity across the globe.

Neanderthals scare us because they are ghosts from the past, a few with wizardly Weasley hair and a sprinkle of freckles, and they are now turned in our direction whispering, "You're not so unique. Watch out."

Meredith F. Small is an anthropologist at Cornell University. She is also the author of "Our Babies, Ourselves; How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent" (link) and "The Culture of Our Discontent; Beyond the Medical Model of Mental Illness" (link).

NEANDERTHALS AND THE POWER OF SPEECH

"Pardon me, my mammoth is a bit bland, do you , by chance happen to have any grey Poupon?"

We keep going further and further away from the long held belief that Neanderthal was a brute, incapable of speech, or art. How vain we are in our veneer of civilization. Neanderthal buried his dead with care, with a thought to an afterlife, Mother Goddess/fertility statues have been found, part of a bone flute like instrument has been recovered, and forensic work has shown they took care of their wounded, hurt, and elderly. Could we do as well if our society, or civilization suddenly was taken from us. I tend to think they would do better at adapting coming into our world, than we going into theirs.--John

Neanderthals Had Key Speech Gene, Researchers Say

But did they have much to say?

By Lucy Sherriff

The REGISTER, UK

Published Friday 19th October 2007 10:22 GMT

Neanderthals may have a reputation in popular culture as a lumbering, grunting people, but researchers have discovered that they did have a gene thought to play a key role in speech.

Samples of DNA were retrieved from two Neanderthal fossils found in a cave in northern Spain. Careful examination revealed that the pair both had the FOXP2 gene. The human version of this gene is different from the chimp version in two places, leading scientists to speculate that these changes are responsible for our ability to speak. The Neanderthals both had the human version.

The findings push back the emergence of a particular gene in the human family tree by some 300,000 years, to the time when the Neanderthal and modern human populations diverged. Previously, the gene was thought to have swept through the modern human population just 50,000 years ago.

But their being capable of speech doesn't prove that we would have been able to sit down with the "cavemen" and have a natter over a cup of tea (proving that our evolutionary cousins could speak is pretty much impossible, given the absence of contemporary sound recording equipment).

Communication is so important to survival

However, Svante Paabo, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who extracted the critical parts of the gene, told the New York Times: "There is no reason to think Neanderthals couldn't speak like humans with respect to FOXP2, but obviously there are many other genes involved in language and speech."

To work out exactly what changes might be wrought in a brain with the human version of FOXP2, the researchers have turned to mice.

Dr Paabo has grown a batch of lab mice whose FOXP2 genes have been replaced with the human version, and says that although their behaviour is unchanged "there seems to be a change in vocalisation. They squeak in a different way". The mice also have extra connections in their brains.

Critics of the work have suggested it could have been contaminated by human DNA, and while Paabo acknowledges this as a possibility, he says he does everything he can to minimise that chance.

You can read more about Dr Paabo's work here. ®

PREHISTORIC LOVE

Love is blind.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

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.

*****

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.

From issue 2613 of New Scientist magazine, 24 July 2007, page 19

Neanderthal Reconstruction

*********

Cro-Magnon Man Reconstruction

Neandertal-Cro-Magnon Hybrid?	April 29, 1999
by Spencer P.M. Harrington

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.

NeanderthalCro-Magnon

Trinkaus 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