All posts tagged: Neanderthal

Neanderthal ‘dentists’ treated cavities 59,000 years ago

Neanderthal ‘dentists’ treated cavities 59,000 years ago

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) were once considered to have been extremely primitive and unsophisticated compared to us humans (Homo sapiens). However, continued research into our long-lost cousins has revealed that these extinct hominids were not quite as archaic as they seemed to early anthropologists.  While archeologists have found that Neanderthals pulled out food from their teeth with toothpicks and may have even used medicinal plants as antibiotics, researchers still aren’t sure about the extent of their medical care abilities. Now, new research published in the journal PLOS One indicates that they were capable of complex dental interventions, which adds a series of cognitive and physical updates to the Neanderthal story.  A team digging in Chagyrskaya Cave in southern Russia’s Altai region found a single Neanderthal molar that is approximately 59,000-years-old. The tooth features toothpick grooves along its sides, and a deep hole in its center that reaches into the pulp cavity. Tooth pulp is the jelly-like material that holds blood …

Neanderthal ‘kneeprint’ found next to mysterious stalagmite circle

Neanderthal ‘kneeprint’ found next to mysterious stalagmite circle

Published by skeptic

Bruniquel cave in France contains circular structures made of broken stalagmites Etienne FABRE/SSAC Around 175,000 years ago, Neanderthals ventured deep inside a cave in what is now France, broke off stalagmites and used them to build mysterious circular structures. Later on, bears moved in and obliterated almost all of the footprints and other traces they left on the cave floor – apart from an impression in clay that could be the kneeprint of a kneeling Neanderthal. “It’s just a hypothesis,” says Sophie Verheyden at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. “To be sure of that, we need a lot of imprints of knees to compare it to.” The stalagmite circles were discovered in the 1990s in Bruniquel cave, near Toulouse in south-west France, and described in a 2016 paper by a team including Verheyden. While ancient human footprints are well known and well studied, ancient kneeprints have never been investigated before, as far as Verheyden is aware. To start doing this, she and her colleagues plan to ask people to kneel in a variety …

You Are Not Prepared to Learn the Size of Neanderthal Infants

You Are Not Prepared to Learn the Size of Neanderthal Infants

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Neanderthal babies were apparently bigger — and grew faster — than familiar human tykes. At least, El Pais reports, that’s the conclusion from a team of scientists based in Israel and Europe who analyzed the remains of a six-month-old Neanderthal ankle biter who was downright colossal, at a comparable size to a one-year-old homo sapien. That means the babies of Neanderthals, extinct cousins to us contemporary humans, were real life versions of the distinctly sturdy cave baby Bamm-Bamm Rubble from the iconic animated show “The Flintstones” The scientists noticed that while the skeletal remains of the Neanderthal child, buried in a cave in Northern Israel about 51,000 to 56,000 years ago, sported relatively thick bones and a large skull that made it seem older, the development of its teeth betrayed its younger age, as detailed in a new paper in the journal Current Biology. “I believe that the histological age of the teeth is more accurate than age …

Neanderthal infants were enormous compared with modern humans

Neanderthal infants were enormous compared with modern humans

Published by skeptic

Reconstruction of a family of Neanderthals P.PLAILLY/E.DAYNES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Neanderthal babies may have physically dwarfed their Homo sapiens counterparts, according to a new study that examined an infant skeleton of one of our ancient hominin relatives. “We cannot say how advanced Neanderthal babies were in their behaviour,” says Ella Been at Ono Academic College in Israel. “We do not know whether they started walking at a different time than modern human babies do.” But, she says, they were big and “not necessarily chubby”. Been and her colleagues conducted a detailed anatomical analysis of the almost-complete skeleton of a Neanderthal baby who lived in what is now Israel sometime between 51,000 and 56,000 years ago. The infant, known as Amud 7, was discovered in a cave 4 kilometres from the western shore of the Sea of Galilee in Israel in 1992. Their sex cannot be determined. Amud 7 is one of only a handful of young Neanderthals that have ever been recorded. Neanderthals were the dominant species of hominin throughout Eurasia for several hundred thousand years until …

The problem with thinking you’re part Neanderthal

The problem with thinking you’re part Neanderthal

Published by skeptic

“The interpretation of genetic data is not straightforward,” Chikhi says. “We always have to make assumptions. Nobody takes data and magically comes up with a solution.”  Embracing the uncertainty  Most of the half-dozen population geneticists I spoke with praised Chikhi and Tournebize’s ingenuity and appreciated the spirit of their critique. “Their paper forces us to think more critically about the model we use for inference and consider alternatives,” says Aaron Ragsdale, a population geneticist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His own work likewise suggests that the earliest Homo sapiens populations in Africa were probably structured—and that this is the likely reason for genomic patterns that other research groups had attributed to hybridization with a mysterious “ghost lineage” of hominins in Africa. Yet most researchers still believe that modern humans and Neanderthals did probably have children with each other tens of thousands of years ago. Several pointed to the fact that fossil DNA of Homo sapiens who died thousands of years ago had longer chunks of apparent Neanderthal DNA than living people, which is exactly what …

Ancient elephant bones reveal vivid details of a Neanderthal hunt

Ancient elephant bones reveal vivid details of a Neanderthal hunt

Published by skeptic

Elephant bones from Lehringen, Germany, bearing marks of butchery by ancient humans VOLKER_MINKUS In the backrooms of the sleek, modern Schöningen Research Museum in Germany, there are piles of old, mismatched cardboard boxes everywhere. These are the finds boxes from Lehringen, a hamlet 150 kilometres from here. In 1948, the bones of a 125,000-year-old straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) were found in an ancient lakebed at Lehringen. Elephant bones from this time period are not so rare, but this one had a 2.3-metre-long spear sticking between its ribs. This yew thrusting lance was then the oldest complete spear ever found. (A part of a spear from an earlier period had previously been found in Clacton-on-Sea in the UK.) The Lehringen spear is still the only one found lodged in the skeleton of an extinct species of animal. Neanderthals were the only humans in Europe at this time, as far as we know, so the spear appeared to provide paradigm-shifting proof that Neanderthals were big game hunters, not scavengers. It should have become a world-famous find. There …

Ancient bones reveal vivid details of a Neanderthal elephant hunt

Ancient bones reveal vivid details of a Neanderthal elephant hunt

Published by skeptic

Elephant bones from Lehringen, Germany, bearing marks of butchery by ancient humans VOLKER_MINKUS In the backrooms of the sleek, modern Schöningen Research Museum in Germany, there are piles of old, mismatched cardboard boxes everywhere. These are the finds boxes from Lehringen, a hamlet 150 kilometres from here. In 1948, the bones of a 125,000-year-old straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) were found in an ancient lakebed at Lehringen. Elephant bones from this time period are not so rare, but this one had a 2.3-metre-long spear sticking between its ribs. This yew thrusting lance was then the oldest complete spear ever found. (A part of a spear from an earlier period had previously been found in Clacton-on-Sea in the UK.) The Lehringen spear is still the only one found lodged in the skeleton of an extinct species of animal. Neanderthals were the only humans in Europe at this time, as far as we know, so the spear appeared to provide paradigm-shifting proof that Neanderthals were big game hunters, not scavengers. It should have become a world-famous find. There …

Neanderthal males preferred human females, genetic study finds

Neanderthal males preferred human females, genetic study finds

Published by Jenni Sidey

Thin stretches of the human X chromosome look oddly empty when you scan for Neanderthal DNA. Geneticists even have a name for the gaps: “Neanderthal deserts.” They sit there like blank tape in an otherwise crowded recording. For years, the standard story went like this: Neanderthal DNA landed in our ancestors’ genomes. However, some of it was harmful, especially on the X chromosome. Natural selection, the thinking said, gradually stripped those “toxic” variants away. A new analysis from Sarah Tishkoff’s lab at the University of Pennsylvania argues that the emptiness may say more about who paired with whom than which genes were dangerous. In Science, the team reports a mirror-image pattern inside Neanderthal genomes. Neanderthals carried unusually high levels of modern human DNA on their X chromosomes compared with the rest of their genome. That reversal, they say, makes simple “toxicity” a much harder explanation to defend. The deserts and the old assumption “Along our X chromosomes, we have these missing swaths of Neanderthal DNA we call ‘Neanderthal deserts,’” says Alexander Platt, a senior research …

Neanderthal enzyme appears to play a significant role in athletic performance

Neanderthal enzyme appears to play a significant role in athletic performance

Published by Jenni Sidey

Deep in your muscles, an enzyme called AMPD1 helps turn chemical fuel into usable energy. When it does not work well, muscles tire faster. That matters because problems with AMPD1 are the most common genetic cause of metabolic muscle disease in Europe, affecting up to 14 percent of people. Now, a new study published in Nature Communications traces one weakened version of this enzyme back tens of thousands of years to Neanderthals. Researchers from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology compared ancient Neanderthal DNA with modern human genomes and found that every Neanderthal carried the same unusual AMPD1 change. No other primate species had it. The research team included geneticists who study human evolution and muscle biology. Their work shows how ancient interbreeding still shapes strength, stamina, and health today. A Small Genetic Change With Big Effects AMPD1 plays a central role in muscle energy production. The Neanderthal version swaps just one building block in the enzyme, yet that small change matters. When researchers recreated the Neanderthal enzyme in the lab, its activity dropped by …

The Neanderthal Story Is Still Evolving (Even If Nothing Else Is)

The Neanderthal Story Is Still Evolving (Even If Nothing Else Is)

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Neanderthals now exist as a separate group only in terms of what we can find out about them. We could say the same for a lot of groups. But we are still learning and surmising new things. Did genetic defects contribute to the Neanderthal population decline? One theory, aired recently at New Scientist, is that modern human–Neanderthal hybrids may have suffered from a genetic defect: We know from genetic studies that there was sustained interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals between approximately 50,000 and 45,000 years ago. The Neanderthals went extinct around 41,000 years ago, but some of their DNA has persisted in modern humans with non-African ancestry, making up around 1 to 2 per cent of the genome. But mysteriously, none of the mitochondrial DNA in modern humans is derived from Neanderthals. This form of DNA is carried by egg cells but not sperm, so it is always inherited from the mother. Patrick Eppenberger at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and his colleagues have proposed a possible explanation for this. They suggest that …