Neanderthals May Have Lasted Longer than Scientist Thought

In our unscientific poll 35% of you believed that Bigfoot is a Neanderthal or an evolved Neanderthal.


Discovery News has an article that supports Neanderthals may have lasted longer than scientist previously thought. They may have even found the location of Neanderthals "last stand," lingering in Russia's Ural Mountains.

Discovery News: NEANDERTHALS' LAST STAND POSSIBLY FOUND
Most anthropologists believe modern humans began to replace Neanderthals starting around 75,000 to 50,000 years ago. Project leader Ludovic Slimak said the study suggests "that Neanderthals did not disappear due to climate shifts or cultural inferiority. It is clear that, showing such adaptability, the Mousterian cultures can no longer be considered as archaic."

Slimak, a University of Toulouse le Mirail anthropologist, Mangerud, and their colleagues made the determinations after analyzing hundreds of stone artifacts and remains of woolly rhinoceros, reindeer, musk ox, brown bear, wolf and polar fox unearthed at a site called Byzovaya in the western foothills of the Polar Urals. Dates were obtained for sand at the site as well as for some of the bones, many of which "have cut marks that indicate processing by humans," according to the researchers.

The tools attributed to the Neanderthal's Mousterian style (named after the site of Le Moustier in southern France, where they were first identified) were mostly flakes, which the scientists recreated by banging a hard hammer on select stones. It's therefore likely that the original creators of the tools used a similar manufacturing method. The preserved flakes could have been used to make two-sided scrapers, perhaps for hunting, removing meat from bones, or working with animal hides.

EXTERNAL LINKS
Discovery News: Neanderthals Last Stand

Different Species, Identical DNA

In two previous posts we introduced the speculation that Modern Humans may have interbred with Neanderthals. these articles are based on Svante Pääbo's quest to sequence the Neanderthal DNA.

Read Love or War with Cavemen and Doin' IT with Neanderthals

In our our third installment we have some interesting revelations surfacing as the Neanderthal DNA sequencing continues.

The first revelation is both DNA's, Neanderthals and Modern Humans, are nearly identical.

Wired Magazine explains further:

"After years of anticipation, the Neanderthal genome has been sequenced. It’s not quite complete, but there’s enough for scientists to start comparing it with our own.

According to these first comparisons, humans and Neanderthals are practically identical at the protein level. Whatever our differences, they’re not in the composition of our building blocks.

However, even if the Neanderthal genome won’t show scientists what makes humans so special, there’s a consolation prize for the rest of us. Most people can likely trace some of their DNA to Neanderthals..."

For Bigfooters this is amazing, because we know Neanderthals and Modern humans were both very physically different, but according to the DNA evidence we would never know to what degree without fossil evidence.

Its a two-edge sword for Bigfoot DNA evidence. If DNA can be so similar, nearly identical, between two species, it may be hard to distinguish Bigfoot DNA.

On the other hand, we may already have Bigfoot DNA and dismissed it because it was so similar to another known species.

The second revelation is, according to studies, not all modern humans contain the same amount of Neanderthal DNA. Modern humans with African descent actually have less traceable Neanderthal DNA.

Such studies will occupy scientists for years to come. In the meantime, the researchers produced a more immediately stirring result. They compared the Neanderthal genome to genomes of five people from China, France, Papua New Guinea, southern Africa and western Africa. Among non-Africans, between one and four percent of all DNA came from Neanderthals...

...For people of African descent disappointed that they lack Neanderthal ancestry, Pääbo gave solace.

“It’s totally possible that inside Africa, there was a contribution from other archaic humans that we don’t know about,” he said. “We shouldn’t take these results as saying that only people outside Africa have caveman biology.”

EXTERNAL LINKS
Wired Magazine Article
Svante Pääbo on Wiki

Things I Learned From “Becoming Human,” part 2

This three-part series, Becoming Human, on PBS’s Nova covers new theories about how and why we evolved into human beings and is well worth watching. You can watch all of the episodes here, as well as view several interesting mini-programs about related topics. This post covers the major idea presented in episode 2, “The Birth of Humanity.” It’s a doozy.

2) Sweating made us human. Okay, bear with me. The big brains we got from climate change needed more food to operate. Our brains use more energy and food than any other organ in our body. To get more food, we turned to meat, which is loaded in calories, protein, and fat. To get meat, since humans don’t have claws, fangs, or great strength, we had to figure out a new way get our meat fix. Scientists now think we turned to persistence hunting, which is chasing the prey until it collapses from exhaustion and then killing it. The Bushmen of Africa still do this, chasing antelopes and other game for several hours in the heat of the day, when most animals are sleeping. It turns out that humans are unique in this capability; we can run for hours in the hottest temperatures because we traded fur for sweating. They think that losing our body hair or fur and gaining the ability to sweat happened at the same time as our brains started to get bigger. Most animals cool themselves by panting. Humans can sweat over their entire bodies which is a more effective method for cooling. Our bigger brains triggered a number of adaptations to support that growth. Because our brains got bigger, we started eating meat, lost our body hair, started sweating, and were able to run down prey for hours at a time. Oh, and our big brains and our new appetite for meat caused us to develop stone tool-making to “process” our kills and fire-making to cook the meat to make it more easily digestible. But the ability to sweat was the big change that enabled everything else. Cool.

Things I Learned From “Becoming Human,” part 1

This three-part series, Becoming Human, on PBS’s Nova covers new theories about how and why we evolved into human beings and is well worth watching. You can watch all of the episodes here, as well as view several interesting mini-programs about related topics. Some of the ideas being offered in Becoming Human are fairly new and have a lot of bearing on how we differ from the other great apes and by inference how we might compare to Bigfoot. I’ll cover the major ideas in each of the three episodes and wrap it all up in the final and third installment.

1) Climate change made us human. At one time, it was thought going from knuckle-walking to bipedalism is what triggered the growth of our brains. But there were bipedal apes staggering around Africa for 4 million years before there was a growth spurt in the brains department 2 million years ago, and then it was a upwards growth from then on. Scientists have now linked it to a long period of climate change in the Africa Rift Valley, where the climate swung back and forth between extreme drought and desertification to extreme rainy periods. This went on for a long time and the most successful bipedal apes were the ones that could adapt the easiest to the extreme changes in climate. The ones that could do this were the ones with bigger brains. They could think better with a bigger brain. The longer the climates changes continued, the bigger our brains got. So bigger brains enabled apes to adapt to their changing surroundings and to eventually adapt their surroundings to themselves—big brains, big advantage, big deal.

Doin' IT with Neanderthals

Modern man and Neanderthals had sex across the species barrier, according to leading geneticist Professor Svante Paabo. Humans and Neanderthals lived amongst each other for over 10,000 yrs. Thats twice the timespan of the Egyptian empire (3400 yrs) and Roman empire (2200 yrs) put together! We know through research both species had the technology to make alcoholic beverages and we know through drinking these beverages, it takes less than 10,000 years for beer goggles to take effect.

There is a great article in the Daily Telegraph tying to prove...

...his theory by examining Neanderthal fossils for traces of modern man's DNA. But if Neanderthal DNA existed in modern man's genes, he believes it will have been diluted below detectable levels.

Professor Paabo, who is director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institution for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, made the claim at a conference in the Cold Springs Laboratory in New York.
But Prof Paabo said he was unclear if the couplings had led to children, of if they were capable of producing offspring.

In recent years, fossils with both Neanderthal and modern human features have been found suggesting the two species interbred but previous scans of Neanderthal genes reveal Neanderthal DNA to have a very different make-up to modern man's.
Neanderthals were primitive beings that lived alongside modern man 30,000 years ago. Prof Paabo is seeking to prove his theory by examining Neanderthal fossils for traces of modern man's DNA. But if Neanderthal DNA existed in modern man's genes, he believes it will have been diluted below detectable levels.

Read the original article here
Read our other posts re: Neanderthals
Neanderthals Sequenced
Did Humans Make Love or War with Cavemen

DID HUMANS MAKE LOVE OR WAR WITH CAVEMEN

Its an ongoing question. Time Magazine has a new article out today suggesting we made war.

It is one of the world's oldest cold cases. Sometime between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago, a Neanderthal male known to scientists as Shanidar 3 received a wound to his torso, limped back to his cave in what is now Iraq and died several weeks later.

New research suggests that Shanidar 3 may have had a more familiar killer: a human being.

At the time of his death, only humans, who had adapted their hunting techniques to the open plains of Africa, had developed projectile weapons; Neanderthals, who hunted in the close quarters of forests, used thrusting spears. To learn the cause of Shanidar 3's wound, Churchill and his team used a specially designed crossbow to fire stone-age projectiles at precise velocities at pig carcasses (a pig's skin and ribs are believed to be roughly as tough as a Neanderthal's). At kinetic energies consistent with a thrown spear, the pig's rib bore damage resembling Shanidar 3's isolated rib puncture. What's more, Churchill found that the weapon that killed Shanidar 3 entered at about a 45-degree downward angle. Churchill also found that Shanidar 3's rib had started healing before he died. By comparing the wound with wounds documented in medical records from the American Civil War, a time before antibiotics, Churchill hypothesized that Shanidar 3 probably died within a few weeks of the injury.

Others suggest they may have interbred with humans.

Read The full Article here.
Read the competing interbreading theory here.

Neandertal DNA Deciphered

By Tina Hesman SaeyWeb edition : Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Results show modern humans, Neandertals diverged 660,000 years ago

Now there’s even more scientific proof that you are not a Neandertal, no matter what anyone says.

An international consortium of researchers reports in the Aug. 8 Cell that for the first time the complete sequence of mitochondrial DNA from a Neandertal has been deciphered. Comparison of the Neandertal sequence with mitochondrial sequences from modern humans confirms that the two groups belong to different branches of humankind’s family tree, diverging 660,000 years ago.

That date is not statistically different from previous estimates of the split between humans and Neandertals, says Erik Trinkaus, a paleoanthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis. The sequence also doesn’t reveal what happened to drive Neandertals to extinction, but it does clear up some discrepancies in earlier studies.

“It’s a major tidying-up of a lot of loose ends,” Trinkaus says.

At 16,565 bases long, the new sequence is the largest stretch of Neandertal DNA ever examined. The DNA was isolated from a 38,000-year-old bone found in a cave in Croatia.

“It’s a nice accomplishment and the next important step toward completing the Neandertal genome,” says Stephan Schuster of Pennsylvania State University in University Park. Schuster is part of a group that is sequencing the genomes of the mammoth and other extinct animals, but was not involved in the current study. “It’s a nice landmark on the way to saying what makes modern humans so s

pecial.”

In order to know exactly how modern humans and Neandertals differ, scientists will need to examine DNA from the Neandertal’s entire genome. The sequence reported in the new study was generated as part of a project to decode Neandertal DNA, but it contains information only about DNA from mitochondria.

Mitochondria are organelles that generate energy for a cell. Inside each mitochondrion is a circular piece of DNA that contains genes encoding some of the key proteins responsible for power generation. Mitochondria are passed down from mothers to their children. Scientists use variations in mitochondrial DNA as a molecular clock to tell how fast species are evolving.

Scientists have previously examined a short piece of Neandertal mitochondrial DNA known as the hypervariable region, but this new complete sequence helps clear up some ambiguities from studies comparing Neandertals and humans, says John Hawks, a biological anthropologist from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Some modern humans have several changes in the hypervariable region that made it seem as if Neandertals are more closely related to modern humans than humans are to each other.

“Comparing the complete mitochondrial DNA genomes of a Neandertal and many recent humans presents a very different picture,” Hawks says. “Humans are all more similar to each other, than any human is to a Neandertal. And in fact the Neandertal sequence is three or more times as different, on average, from us as we are from each other. This change from the earlier picture is a purely statistical one, but it makes a clearer picture.”

Human and Neandertal mitochondrial DNAs differ at 206 positions out of the 16,565 examined, while modern humans differ at only about 100 positions when compared with each other.

The mitochondrial genome contains 13 genes, blueprints for stringing amino acids together to make proteins. The researchers examined the nature of changes within those genes to learn how proteins evolve. Generally, changes that alter the amino acid sequence of a protein are bad because they disrupt the way a protein works or interacts with other proteins, says Richard Green, a computational biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Neandertals have more amino-acid altering changes in their mitochondrial genes than do other primates, Green and his colleagues found.

“This really demands an explanation,” Green says. One scenario that could explain the finding is that Neandertals had very small effective populations long before they went extinct.

But humans also have changes in some of their mitochondrial genes. One gene, called COX2, had four changes specific to humans. Neandertals, chimpanzees and other primates don’t have those changes. “This tells us these changes happened very recently and perhaps conferred some selective advantage” for humans, Green says. The data reinforce the notion that humans are evolving faster than other primates and “it gets us closer to understanding what it means to be a fully modern human.”

Source: http://www.sciencenews.org