It appears that we were neighbors, for a while.
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Neanderthals and humans lived side by side
* 18:00 13 September 2006
* NewScientist.com news service
* Rowan Hooper
Neanderthals were thought to have died out as modern humans arrived in
Europe. Now, artifacts found in a cave in Gibraltar reveal that the two
groups coexisted for millenia before Neanderthals finally dwindled out
of existence.
Homo sapiens moved into Europe about 32,000 years ago. But the newly
unearthered artefacts shows that a remnant population of Homo
neanderthalensis clung on until at least 28,000 years ago, a significant
overlap.
Clive Finlayson at the Gibraltar Museum, and colleagues, recovered 240
stone tools and artefacts from sediments dated to the Upper Palaeolithic
period between 10,000 and 30,000 years ago. Mass spectrometry dating
puts them between 28,000 and 24,000 years old.
The exciting point is that the tools are all of a type known to
palaeontologists as Mousterian: they are flints, cherts and quartzites
exclusively associated with Neanderthal manufacture.
Mousterian technology is firmly associated with Neanderthals across
Europe, says Finlayson, who adds that in the sediment layers where the
tools where found there is no hint of intrusion from more recent layers,
and no sign of tools made by modern humans.
Genetically distinct
Since modern humans and Neanderthals seem to have overlapped for
thousands of years in Europe, the big question is: did they interbreed?
The consensus now sees Neanderthals as having been largely replaced
rather than assimilated into the modern human gene pool, says Katerina
Harvati, at the department of human evolution at the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Genetic
evidence from several Neanderthals shows that they were very distant
genetically in their mitochondrial DNA from modern humans.
So, if they did interbred, the Neanderthal genes did not survive. The
more realistic demographic models suggest that admixture (gene mixing)
was unlikely, and probably minimal or zero, says Harvati.
The finding has implications for the status of a skeleton known as the
Lagar Velho child. This individual, purported to be a hybrid of a
Neanderthal and a modern human, was found in Portugal and has been dated
to 24,500 years ago.
Hanging in there
Lagar Velho's juvenile nature has made it difficult to determine if it
is indeed a hybrid, and one of the other objections has been the fact
that it lived thousands of years after the Neanderthals were thought to
have died out. Clearly, our results show Neanderthals may have been
around at the time, says Finlayson.
The site of the discovery in Gibraltar is Gorhams Cave, where
Neanderthal artefacts were first discovered more than 50 years ago.
Animal bones found with the tools indicate that the occupants butchered
their hunted prey in the cave. The environment is rich and diverse,
which perhaps enabled the last of the Neanderthal stragglers to survive
a little longer than most. Finlayson estimates that only a small group
lived in the cave itself.
Although modern humans were breeding all around them, we are not thought
to have actively exterminated the Neanderthals.
Fragmented populations survived in southern localities and their final
extinction may have been due to their small numbers, says Finlayson.
Modern humans played a minor or no role in this.
Journal reference: Nature (DOI: 10.1038/nature05195)
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10070
--
John Hachmann aa #1782
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities"
-Voltaire
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