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Neanderthal jewelry

 Human origins and evolution, Thought and consciousness  Comments Off
Jan 122010
 

Seashells were painted and used as adornment by early humans, and this is commonly taken to indicate an ability to think symbolically. There has been very little evidence that Neanderthals shared this ability. In fact, the belief that Neanderthals were cognitively inferior to humans has been given as a reason for why they died out.

However, a recent find challenges the idea that Neanderthals were incapable of symbolic thought. Scallop and cockle shells showing traces of applied pigment were found in two caves in southeastern Spain. The shells are estimated to be about 50,000 years old; fossil evidence of modern humans in the area goes back only 40,000 years.

Several past discoveries have suggested that Neanderthals might have created what could be considered jewelry or art. The evidence was scanty, and these earlier discoveries were generally not interpreted as true instances of symbolic thinking. This new evidence, however, combined with the earlier finds, seems to indicate that we’ve been underestimating the mental capacities of this fascinating species. In fact, this article from Scientific American even suggests that rather than developing jewelry independently, Neanderthals might have taught humans how to make art, or vice versa.

The findings will appear in the January 11 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and are available online now:

Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals
João Zilhão, Diego E. Angelucci, Ernestina Badal-García, Francesco d’Errico, Floréal Daniel, Laure Dayet, Katerina Douka, Thomas F. G. Higham, María José Martínez-Sánchez, Ricardo Montes-Bernárdez, Sonia Murcia-Mascarós, Carmen Pérez-Sirvent, Clodoaldo Roldán-García, Marian Vanhaeren, Valentín Villaverde, Rachel Wood, and Josefina Zapata.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.0914088107

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What really happened to the Neanderthals?

 Human origins and evolution  1 Response »
Dec 232008
 

Well, that’s a good question, subject to considerable debate. This paper in PLoS One reports on some research that evaluates two factors in the extinction of the Neanderthals: an inability to adapt to climate change, and competition with anatomically modern humans. The work involved integrating multiple data sets to estimate the ecological niches occupied by humans and Neanderthals. The results indicate that the presence of humans was the deciding factor. In particular, the potential distribution of Neanderthals based on conditions during a particular climate period was larger than the actual distribution, and this result, combined with a large overlap in human and Neanderthal niches, suggests that environmental conditions were not the main limiting factor on Neanderthal populations.

Banks WE, d’Errico F, Peterson AT, Kageyama M, Sima A, et al. (2008) Neanderthal Extinction by Competitive Exclusion. PLoS ONE 3(12): e3972.

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Neanderthals in the news

 Human origins and evolution  Comments Off
Jun 232008
 

The perennially popular topic of what the Neanderthals were like and how they lived is in the news this week. This article from the Discovery Channel describes some work at an archaeological site in southern England that has been a treasure trove of Neanderthal stone tools. The picture that is evidently emerging through research at the site is of a canny Neanderthal population that was technologically sophisticated (for its day). The site appears to have been occupied just before the disappearance of the Neanderthals, and the new view of how they lived may make their demise a bit more mysterious.

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The family of man

 Human origins and evolution  3 Responses »
Mar 202008
 

Several news items have appeared lately about human evolution. This article from the New York Times examines some new evidence in the debate over the disputed new species, Homo floresiensis. Small hominin fossils discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores are believed by some to represent a newly discovered species of humans, and by others to be the bones of modern humans, perhaps adapted for island life (which often reduces the size of a species over time) or perhaps suffering from congenital disorders. Now another set of fossils from small humans has been discovered, this batch on a Micronesian island. The new fossils share some facial traits with the Flores fossils, but had bigger brains and are believed to be smaller versions of modern humans, suggesting that perhaps the Flores bones are not a new species either. There’s no end in sight yet for the debate, which the article summarizes.

This article from Live Science covers a new study into skeletal differences between humans and Neanderthals, our fellow hominins who likely shared the planet with us before dying out around 30,000 years ago. After examining human and Neanderthal skulls, a research team concluded that the differences between them are random individual characteristics and not evidence of any evolutionary adaptations that gave humans the edge over Neanderthals. One possible conclusion is that it was not a physiological or anatomical difference that made us better equipped to thrive on the planet, but some kind of social or cultural edge. On the other hand, Erik Trinkaus, Neanderthal researcher at Washington University in St. Louis and unconnected with the recent skull study, sees very little meaningful difference of any sort between the two species, and argues that perhaps it was just luck that led to the success of humans and the death of Neanderthals.

And finally, going much further back in time, recent research suggests that bipedalism did not arise relatively recently in the hominin lineage but goes clear back to a species called Orrorin tugenensis. This very early hominin lived in Africa around six million years ago, somewhere around the time that the chimpanzee and human branches diverged from each other. Measurements of fossil thigh bones indicate that it walked upright on two legs some of the time and also spent some time climbing trees on all fours; biomechanically its gait differed from that of modern humans. Walking upright evidently has a longer and more complicated story than we knew before. This story from US News & World Report has the details.

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FOXP2 gene in Neanderthals

 Human origins and evolution  Comments Off
Oct 192007
 

An examination of Neanderthal DNA shows that Neanderthals shared with humans a gene important in speech and language. Researchers extracted and analyzed DNA from fossilized Neanderthal bones from a cave in Spain, and found that the FOXP2 gene in the Neanderthal DNA resembles this gene in modern humans. The FOXP2 gene is the only gene identified so far that is specifically associated with speech and language abilities. FOXP2 in humans differs in two places from the same gene in chimpanzees, and the Neanderthal version of the gene shares these two differences, which are presumably linked to the different speech abilities of humans and chimps.

This tells us something about what language and speech capabilities Neanderthals might have had, although certainly other genes are involved in language and it’s hard to tell exactly what the presence of this one gene might have meant. It also tells us something about the evolution of the FOXP2 gene. An earlier analysis had indicated that the human form of the gene had appeared and spread rapidly through the population sometime in the last 200,000 years. However, if the new results are accurate, the gene must have appeared much earlier, before humans and Neanderthals split into separate species about 350,000 years ago.

The New York Times has this article about the new discovery, and there’s also a press release from EurekAlert. Thanks to Mark for telling me about this one.

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Neanderthal news

 Human origins and evolution  Comments Off
Sep 132007
 

The question of what happened to the Neanderthals is a perennial mystery so far. According to the latest news, their disappearance from history does not seem to coincide with the onset of an ice age. Using a technique for correlating climate records with estimated dates for when the Neanderthals disappeared, researchers examined three possible dates for the Neanderthal artifacts at a cave in Gibraltar, Spain. (This is believed to have been one of the last toe-holds that Neanderthal had in the world before going extinct.) None of the dates match with a sudden shift toward a colder climate, which would suggest that whatever happened to them, it’s probably not that they succumbed to unusually harsh weather. This story from Live Science has the details.

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