Not Evidence of "Evolution" - Evidence of Conceptual Intelligence

I missed this somehow in 2016 when the story came out, I think, so I'm posting it here now, from The Washington Post:

170,000 years before Stonehenge, Neanderthals built their own incredible structure

Sarah Kaplan, May 26, 2016

A 3D reconstruction of the structures in the Bruniquel Cave. (Xavier Muth - Get in Situ, Archéotransfert, Archéovision -SHS-3D, base photographique Pascal Mora).

This deep inside the cave, sunlight was just a memory. Mineral-laden water dripped from the ceiling, accumulating on spiny stalagmites below. Every footstep echoed and long shadows cast by the fires danced on the damp, rugged walls.

Hundreds of centuries ago, someone trudged into that foreboding darkness. Methodically, they broke apart hundreds of stalagmites and arranged the pieces in cryptic piles on the cave floor: two stone rings, one vast and one small, and several piles containing charred rock. They may have been holding a religious ceremony. Or perhaps they simply needed a place to cook away from the cave bears and the cold. The purpose of these structures remains an enigma.

But their creators are not. In a study in the journal Nature, scientists report that these strange stalagmite piles found in the south of France were formed roughly 176,000 years ago by Neanderthals.

That Neanderthal "Burial" -- It Was Deliberate and It Is Real

My take on this story is that so-called "modern humans" may well have borrowed the so-called "Neanderthal" practice of burying their dead and incorporated it into their own rituals.  The full story has yet to be figured out, dear readers.

From Live Science

Neanderthals May Have Intentionally Buried Their Dead

Charles Q Choi, LiveScience Contributor | December 16, 2013 03:00pm ET

 

Are modern humans the only species that has ever dug graves? New research suggests the answer is no: Neanderthals also may have intentionally buried their dead. The new findings are further evidence that Neanderthals might have possessed complex forms of thought — enough for special treatment of the dead, scientists said.
The first potential discovery of a Neanderthal tomb occurred in 1908 at La Chapelle-aux-Saints in southwestern France. The well-preserved state of these 50,000-year-old bones led researchers to suggest that Neanderthals buried their dead well before modern humans arrived in western Europe. However, skeptics argued that the burials may not have been intentional.

Neanderthals were known to bury their dead in the Middle East. However, these burials dated to a time when contact with modern humans (Homo sapiens) might have occurred, suggesting that humans' Neanderthal relatives might not have come up with this idea on their own.

Still, in the past decade, a number of discoveries suggest that Neanderthals were capable of complex mental behavior, such as wearing decorative feathers. These findings could potentially support the idea that Neanderthals had minds complex enough to contemplate revering the dead enough to create tombs for them.

Grave controversy

To help end this controversy, between 1999 and 2012, scientists excavated seven caves at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, where the first known potential Neanderthal burial was discovered. [See Images of the Neanderthal Burial Pits]

"One of our major difficulties was convincing the scientific community that a site excavated 100 years ago might still be rich in information," said study lead author William Rendu, a paleoanthropologist at France's National Center for Scientific Research and New York University.

The researchers found more Neanderthal remains — two children and one adult — as well as some bison and reindeer bones. They did not find tool marks or other conclusive evidence of intentional digging of the earth at the site, but geological analysis of the 15-inch-deep (39 centimeters) pit where the remains were found suggested it was not a natural feature of the cave floor.

Moreover, when the scientists examined the Neanderthal remains found at the site in 1908, they discovered that unlike the bison and reindeer bones, the Neanderthal fossils had few cracks, no smoothing related to natural erosion from the environment and no signs of disturbance by animals. These traits suggest the Neanderthal was buried rapidly, and perhaps intentionally, to protect the bones.

"It is novel evidence that Neanderthals were able to develop, by themselves, some complex symbolic thought," Rendu told LiveScience. "The behavioral distance between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans seems to become even thinner."

It remains uncertain what the precise meaning of this burial might have been, or if burial was a common practice among Neanderthals. "We need to compare this data to other possible burials from the same period and region," Rendu said. "The problem is that they all come from old excavations, and they all need to be reanalyzed and discussed."

Rendu and his colleagues detailed their findings online Dec. 16 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

New "Archaic" Mystery Humans Uncovered in Latest DNA Genome Sequencing

Heh heh heh :)  I love this!

From Nature Magazine Online:

Mystery humans spiced up ancients’ rampant sex lives

Genome analysis suggests interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and a mysterious archaic population.

• Ewen Callaway

19 November 2013

 

New genome sequences from two extinct human relatives suggest that these ‘archaic’ groups bred with humans and with each other more extensively than was previously known.

 

The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a different archaic human group, the Denisovans, were presented on 18 November at a meeting at the Royal Society in London. They suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups living in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet unknown human ancestor from Asia.

“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a ‘Lord of the Rings’-type world — that there were many hominid populations,” says Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London who was at the meeting but was not involved in the work.

The first Neanderthal¹ and the Denisovan² genome sequences revolutionized the study of ancient human history, not least because they showed that these groups interbred with anatomically modern humans, contributing to the genetic diversity of many people alive today. [If their DNA is still extent in modern populations, can it truly be said that Neanderthan and Denisovan are extinct?]

All humans whose ancestry originates outside of Africa owe about 2% of their genome to Neanderthals; and certain populations living in Oceania, such as Papua New Guineans and Australian Aboriginals, got about 4% of their DNA from interbreeding between their ancestors and Denisovans, who are named after the cave in Siberia’s Altai Mountains where they were discovered. The cave contains remains deposited there between 30,000 and 50,000 years ago.

Those conclusions however were based on low-quality genome sequences, riddled with errors and full of gaps, David Reich, an evolutionary geneticist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts said at the meeting. His team, in collaboration with Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have now produced much more complete versions of the Denisovan and Neanderthal genomes — matching the quality of contemporary human genomes. The high-quality Denisovan genome data and new Neanderthal genome both come from bones recovered from Denisova Cave.

The new Denisovan genome indicates that this enigmatic population got around: Reich said at the meeting that they interbred with Neanderthals and with the ancestors of human populations that now live in China and other parts of East Asia, in addition to Oceanic populations, as his team previously reported. Most surprisingly, Reich said, the new genomes indicate that Denisovans interbred with another extinct population of archaic humans that lived in Asia more than 30,000 years ago, which is neither human nor Neanderthal.

The meeting was abuzz with conjecture about the identity of this potentially new population of humans. “We don’t have the faintest idea,” says Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the London Natural History Museum, who was not involved in the work. He speculates that the population could be related to Homo heidelbergensis, a species that left Africa around half a million years ago and later gave rise to Neanderthals in Europe. “Perhaps it lived on in Asia as well,” Stringer says.

My question:  If their DNA still exists and can be measured in modern populations, can it truly be said that Neanderthal, Denisovan and the "unknown archaic humans" are extinct?

Did "Neanderthal" Man Make Art After All?

From nature.com

Neanderthal culture: Old masters

The earliest known cave paintings fuel arguments about whether Neanderthals were the mental equals of modern humans.

• Tim Appenzeller¹

15 May 2013

 

Spots and stencils in El Castillo cave, Spain — one at least 40,800 years old — might be the handiwork of Neanderthals.

PEDRO SAURA

 

In a damp Spanish cave, Alistair Pike applies a small grinder to the world's oldest known paintings. Every few minutes, the dentist-drill sound stops and Pike, an archaeologist from the University of Southampton, UK, stands aside so that a party of tourists can admire the simple artwork — hazy red disks, stencilled handprints, the outlines of bison — daubed on the cave wall tens of thousands of years ago. He hopes that the visitors won't notice the small scuff marks he has left.

In fact, Pike's grinder — and the scalpel that he wields to scrape off tiny samples — is doing no harm to the actual paintings, and he is working with the full approval of the Spanish authorities. Pike is after the crust of calcite that has built up over the millennia from groundwater dripping down the wall. The white flecks that he dislodges hold a smattering of uranium atoms, whose decay acts as a radioactive clock. A clock that has been ticking ever since the calcite formed on top of the art.

The results of an earlier round of sampling in El Castillo cave, published last June¹, showed that the oldest of the paintings, a simple red spot, dates to at least 40,800 years ago, roughly when the first modern humans reached western Europe. Pike and his colleagues think that when they analyse the latest samples, the paintings may turn out to be older still, perhaps by thousands of years — too old to have been made by modern humans. If so, the artists must have been Neanderthals, the brawny, archaic people who were already living in Europe.

The answer won't be known for at least a year, but if it favours the Neanderthals, it could tip — if not resolve — a debate that has rumbled for decades: did the Neanderthals, once caricatured as brute cavemen, have minds like our own, capable of abstract thinking, symbolism and even art? It is one of the most haunting questions about the people who once shared a continent with us, then mysteriously vanished.

An early date for the paintings would also be a vindication for the slight, dark-haired man watching as Pike works: João Zilhão, who has emerged as the leading advocate for Neanderthals, relentlessly pressing the case that these ice-age Europeans were our cognitive equals. Zilhão, an archaeologist at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies at the University of Barcelona in Spain, believes that other signs of sophisticated Neanderthal culture have already proved his point. But he is willing to debate on his opponents' terms. “To my mind, we don't need that evidence,” he says of the paintings. “But I guess for many of my colleagues this would be the smoking gun.”

The front line in the Neanderthal wars runs through another cave: Grotte du Renne, 1,000 kilometres away in central France. As early as the 1950s, excavations there unearthed a collection of puzzling artefacts. Among them were bone awls, distinctive stone blades and palaeolithic baubles — the teeth of animals such as foxes or marmots, grooved or pierced so that they could be worn on a string. They were buried beneath artefacts typical of the first modern humans in Europe, suggesting that these objects were older. A startling possibility loomed: that artefacts of this style, collectively known as the Châtelperronian industry, were made by Neanderthals.

Close cousins of modern humans, Neanderthals evolved in western Eurasia and had Europe to themselves for more than 200,000 years, enduring several ice ages. In spite of their survival skills and big brains — comparable to our own — they had never been linked to sophisticated tools of this kind, or to ornaments. Yet in 1980, archaeologists reported finding a Neanderthal skeleton among Châtelperronian tools at another site in France². And in 1996, French palaeoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin and his colleagues reported that a skull fragment from the ornament layer in the Grotte du Renne was unmistakably Neanderthal³.

Ever since then, the Grotte du Renne has been exhibit A in the case that Neanderthals, like ourselves, trafficked in symbols, using ornaments as badges of identity for individuals or groups. [Oh please - from discovering these artifacts to claiming that "Neanderthal" used them as "badges of identity" -- what is the basis for this assertion?  Most people today, and I expect "back then" too, did not wear jewelry as "badges of identity" but for the pure pleasure of wearing a unique and/or beautiful and/or rare object!  Taking pleasure in a beautiful, rare, unique thing does not make it a "badge of identity."  Geez!] 

Hublin himself did not go that far. He suggested that the Neanderthals had fallen under the spell of strange new neighbours: modern humans, who were thought to have reached Europe around the time of the Châtelperronian industry. Neanderthals might have acquired the ice-age bling from modern humans, or made the pendants themselves under the influence of the new arrivals. [So, "Neanderthals" were either sophisticated enough to establish a trading network with these "newcomer humans" or were sophisticated enough to copy their designs...]

That conclusion infuriated Zilhão, turning him into the passionate advocate he is today. He questioned the evidence that modern humans were already on the scene and detected a bias against our extinct cousins. “Why was the equally if not more legitimate hypothesis — that the Neanderthals themselves had been the authors of this stuff and made it for their own use — not even considered?” asks Zilhão.

On a visit to rock-art sites in Portugal, he discussed the paper with Francesco d'Errico, an archaeologist who is now at the University of Bordeaux in France. D'Errico had the same reaction, Zilhão recalls. “And he said: 'OK, let's do something about it.'” Since then, the pair has fought a two-front war, advancing evidence for Neanderthal capabilities while challenging studies that reserve symbolism and abstract thinking for modern humans.

Unknown artists

More than 15 years later, the Grotte du Renne continues to be a battleground. Since 2010, three papers have given duelling interpretations of the artefact-bearing layers. In the first, a group led by dating expert Thomas Higham of the University of Oxford, UK, used new carbon dates to argue that the layers were scrambled, mixing older remains with younger⁴. If that was correct, said Higham's team, the relics adjacent to the telltale skull fragment might not have belonged to Neanderthals after all.

Within months, Zilhão, d'Errico and their colleagues fired back with an analysis⁵ of how artefacts of different types were distributed in the Grotte du Renne, concluding that the layers were undisturbed and that the Neanderthal link could be trusted. A group led by Hublin (now at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany) presented its own dates last year, backing Zilhão's claim⁶. But Hublin still denied the Neanderthals full credit. Neanderthals did make the objects, now dated to between 45,000 and 40,000 years ago, he said — but only after they encountered modern humans. And this time he had fresh evidence to draw on.

Carbon dates measured by Higham and others at caves in Italy, Britain and Germany suggest that modern humans began expanding into Europe as early as 45,000 years ago, several thousand years earlier than was thought (see Nature 485, 27–29; 2012). Zilhão strenuously disputes those claims, doubting whether the shells or animal bones used for dating truly reflect the age of the human fossils at the sites, or whether the human remains are modern. “The evidence to show an early presence of modern humans in Europe is worse today than it was 20 years ago,” he declares.

Hublin, however, has no doubt that our ancestors had already entered the picture when Neanderthals in France began making bone awls and animal-tooth pendants. To assume that Neanderthals invented these technologies on their own is to accept “an incredible coincidence”, he says. “Just as modern humans arrive with these things in their pocket — bingo!”

Like minds

Despite the stalemate, Zilhão says that the record of Neanderthal behaviour tens of thousands of years before modern humans arrived in Europe proves his point (see 'Minds at work'). Neanderthals are believed to have buried their dead, suggesting that they had some kind of spirituality. They made glue for securing spear points by heating birch sap while protecting it from the air, a feat that even modern experimental archaeologists have trouble replicating. Many Neanderthal sites include lumps of pigment — red ochre and black manganese — that sometimes seem to be worn down like stone-age crayons. Zilhão and others think that the Neanderthals painted themselves, creating striking patterns on their pale, northern skin that were every bit as symbolic as the art and ornaments of modern humans.

“You don't need to have shell beads, you don't need to have artefacts with graphical representation to have behaviour that can be defined archaeologically as symbolic,” he says. “Burying your dead is symbolic behaviour. Making sophisticated chemical compounds in order to haft your stone tools implies a capacity to think in abstract ways, a capacity to plan ahead, that's fundamentally similar to ours.”

Where Zilhão sees a clear pattern, sceptics see uncertainties. Harold Dibble, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, is re-examining supposed Neanderthal burial sites. At one, the French cave of Roc de Marsal, he says that what seemed to be a deliberately excavated grave is actually a natural pit. At another, La Ferrassie, he sees evidence that sediments swept into the cave by water — not grieving kin — could have buried Neanderthal remains.

As for the ochre crayons, Dibble is dismissive. “You see some wear on a piece of ochre and soon you've got Neanderthal body painting,” he says. “What a lot of logical leaps.” [No more a logical leap than assuming that a decorative object worn by an ancient individual was worn as a "badge of identity."] He and others say that the pigment has many possible uses: as an insect repellent, a preservative for food or animal skins, an ingredient in adhesives. Even Wil Roebroeks of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, who found evidence for ochre use as early as 250,000 years ago at a Dutch Neanderthal site⁷, says that Zilhão “jumps too fast from the presence of ochre to body decoration”.

Ask Dibble, Hublin and other sceptics what would persuade them that Neanderthals had minds like ours, and their answer is simple: a pattern of art or other sophisticated symbolic expression from a time when no modern humans could possibly have been around. “But I don't think it exists,” says Hublin. [Maybe we're not looking at what is left behind correctly; maybe most of it was wiped out in the intervening years.  After all, 50,000 to 100,000 years ago was a fricking LONG time ago to expect something to survive.]

Zilhão, however, points to a singular finding from a Neanderthal site in southern Spain that he reported three years ago⁸: three cockle shells each with holes near one edge, as if they had been worn as ornaments. One contains a trace of red pigment, and a fourth shell is stained with a mixture of colours, as if it had been used as a paint container. The shells, says Zilhão, imply symbolic thinking fully equivalent to that of the modern humans who left troves of beads in South Africa 75,000 years ago. And at roughly 50,000 years old, he says, the Spanish shells date from a time well before modern humans reached the region.

Critics are not satisfied. The perforations are natural, as Zilhão himself noted, which suggests to Hublin and Dibble that rather than systematically fashioning ornaments, Neanderthals might have picked up a few odd shells on a whim. “When you've got isolated occurrences, one-offs, that's not going to convince most of us,” says Dibble.

The paintings in El Castillo could help to establish a pattern. The research group was conservative with the ages it reported last June¹, which put the earliest calcite at nearly 41,000 years old. Nervous about damaging the pigment, the team left several millimetres of the veneer intact at each sampled spot. Deeper, older layers might push back the paintings' minimum ages by several thousand years.

That prospect brought the team back to El Castillo last October. Grinding and scraping through a long day, the researchers concentrate on the red disks and hand stencils that had yielded the earliest dates last time around. The goal, says Zilhão, is “to date pigments in these paintings to an age that is clearly and to everyone's satisfaction beyond the range of modern humans in Europe”.

Yet an early date may not settle the long-running dispute. Hublin sets the bar high. “If Zilhão finds a date of earlier than 50,000 years ago, I'll be convinced!” he says. Any younger, and modern human influence would remain a possibility, he says, noting recent hints that our ancestors had advanced into Turkey or even central Europe by 50,000 years ago. And one example of crude painting — what Dibble calls “Neanderthal doodling” — might not be enough to win over the doubters. Zilhão's knockout blow may simply lead to more fighting.

Yet signs of a middle ground are emerging. Chris Stringer, a palaeoanthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London, says that 20 years ago, he believed that if the Neanderthals made the Châtelperronian ornaments, they were blindly imitating modern humans. “Our interpretation was that they were copying but that they didn't have the brainpower to give full value” to the objects. He wouldn't say so now. Two decades of discoveries of sophisticated Neanderthal tools and weapons have made him think that “the gulf was not as great”: that the difference between Neanderthals and ourselves was a matter more of culture than of ability.

“You can see the Neanderthals were held back by various factors that were not down to their brains,” he adds. The climate of ice-age Europe kept their population size “frighteningly small”, he says — at times just a few thousand people across a whole continent, most of them dead by the age of 30. How could such a sparse, beleaguered people develop and sustain a sophisticated culture?

That's not so different from what d'Errico, Zilhão's comrade-in-arms for almost 20 years, now says. He still thinks that the Neanderthals probably invented the Châtelperronian artefacts before modern humans were on the scene. But he is open to the idea that aspects of modern human culture preceded their wholesale arrival in Europe. “It's possible that some influence did spread,” says d'Errico. “I'm less militant than João.” That takes nothing away from the Neanderthals, he adds. “The fact that Neanderthals can absorb influences, can re-elaborate them, can make them part of their own culture, is very modern behaviour.”

But there is a final stretch of ground that neither side will concede. Were the Neanderthals truly the same as us, cognitively? No, says Stringer. The Neanderthal genome, decoded⁹ in 2010, differs from that of modern humans in some regions linked to brain function, he notes. And this year, he suggested that, compared with modern humans, larger volumes of Neanderthals' brains were devoted to vision and to controlling their heavier bodies¹⁰ (see ‘Two kinds of human’). That might have left them with less capacity for social awareness and interaction. “If you imagine a Neanderthal in modern society, there would still be differences,” says Stringer.

Zilhão rejects any distinctions. Emerging from the cave into a rainy evening, he muses that if he pushes back the age of the El Castillo paintings, his critics may argue that he has simply proved an earlier presence of modern humans in Europe. “To which I will say, 'Of course. Neanderthals were modern humans too.'”

Nature

Volume:

497,

Pages:

302–304

Date published:

(16 May 2013)

DOI:

doi:10.1038/497302a

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Would It Be Ethical to Clone a Neanderthal Child?

Wanted: 'Adventurous woman' to give birth to Neanderthal man - Harvard professor seeks mother for cloned cave baby

• Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA
• His ambitious plan requires a human volunteer willing to allow the DNA to be put into stem cells, then a human embryo

By Allan Hall and Fiona Macrae

PUBLISHED:10:36 EST, 20 January 2013| UPDATED:04:16 EST, 21 January 2013


They're usually thought of as a brutish, primitive species.

So what woman would want to give birth to a Neanderthal baby?

Yet this incredible scenario is the plan of one of the world’s leading geneticists, who is seeking a volunteer to help bring man’s long-extinct close relative back to life.
Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School believes he can reconstruct Neanderthal DNA and resurrect the species which became extinct 33,000 years ago.  His scheme is reminiscent of Jurassic Park but, while in the film dinosaurs were created in a laboratory, Professor Church’s ambitious plan requires a human volunteer.

He said his analysis of Neanderthal genetic code using samples from bones is complete enough to reconstruct their DNA. He said: ‘Now I need an adventurous female human.

‘It depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think it can be done.’

Professor Church’s plan would begin by artificially creating Neanderthal DNA based on genetic code found in fossil remains. He would put this DNA into stem cells.  These would be injected into cells from a human embryo in the early stages of life.  It is thought that the stem cells would steer the development of the hybrid embryo on Neanderthal lines, rather than human ones.

After growing in the lab for a few days, the ‘neo-Neanderthal’ embryo would be implanted in the womb of a surrogate mother – the volunteer. Professor Church, 58, is a pioneer in synthetic biology who helped initiate the Human Genome Project that mapped our DNA.
He says Neanderthals were not the lumbering brutes of the stereotype, but highly intelligent. Their brains were roughly the same size as man’s, and they made primitive tools.
He believes his project could benefit mankind. He told German magazine Der Spiegel: ‘Neanderthals might think differently than we do. They could even be more intelligent than us.

‘When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet, it’s conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.’

Scientists say that his plan is theoretically possible, although in Britain, like most countries, human reproductive cloning is a criminal offence.  But Professor Church’s proposal is so cutting-edge that it may not be covered by existing laws.  However, experts worry that neo-Neanderthals might lack the immunity to modern diseases to survive, and some fear that the process might lead to deformity.

There is also uncertainty over how they would fit into today’s world. Bioethicist Bernard Rollin of Colorado State University said: ‘I don’t think it’s fair to put people... into a circumstance where they are going to be mocked and possibly feared.’

In a scathing reaction, Philippa Taylor of the Christian Medical Fellowship said:  ‘It is hard to know where to begin with the ethical and safety concerns.’

****************************************************

Sounds to me like this crazy professor wants to breed Neanderthals to use as guinea pigs -- any protests coming from the anti-animal abuse interest group on this?  I can see what this man and others like him -- and even worse than him -- are thinking in addition:  slaves; harvesting organs; programmed soldiers to act as non-stop killers.  After all, they're not really human beings, are they. 

Promiscuous Neanderthals: Republicans Would Hate You!

Rush Limbaugh caused controversy earlier this year when he called a female student lawyer a slut for using birth control paid for by her health insurance.  What would Rush think about these slutty Neanderthals who apparently slept around enough to deposit their DNA into just about every extent human "race" known today, except for those in sub-Saharan Africa -- you know, the continent with countries everyone else except the Iranians and the Chinese pretend doesn't exist.

The Real Question: Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals?

Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor

Date: 01 November 2012 Time: 08:55 AM ET

QUERY:  How can anyone say so-called Neanderthals are "extinct" when a large majority of so-called modern humans today carry 3 to 4% of their DNA within us?

The only modern humans whose ancestors did not interbreed with Neanderthals are apparently sub-Saharan Africans, researchers say.

New findings suggest modern North Africans carry genetic traces from Neanderthals, modern humanity's closest known extinct relatives.

Although modern humans are the only surviving members of the human lineage, others once roamed the Earth, including the Neanderthals. Genetic analysis of these extinct lineages’ fossils has revealed they once interbred with our ancestors, with recent estimates suggesting that Neanderthal DNA made up 1 percent to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes. Although this sex apparently only rarely produced offspring, this mixing was enough to endow some people with the robust immune systems they enjoy today.

The Neanderthal genome revealed that people outside Africa share more genetic mutations with Neanderthalsthan Africans do. One possible explanation is that modern humans interbred with Neanderthals mostly after the modern lineage began appearing outside Africa at least 100,000 years ago. Another, more complex scenario is that an African group ancestral to both Neanderthals and certain modern human populations genetically split from other Africans beginning about 230,000 years ago. This group then stayed genetically distinct until it eventually left Africa.

To shed light on why Neanderthals appear most closely related to people outside Africa, scientists analyzed North Africans. Some researchers had suggested these groups were the sources of the out-of-Africa migrations that ultimately spread humans around the globe.

The researchers focused on 780,000 genetic variants in 125 people representing seven different North African locations. They found North Africans had dramatically more genetic variants linked with Neanderthals than sub-Saharan Africans did. The level of genetic variants that North Africans share with Neanderthals is on par with that seen in modern Eurasians.

The scientists also found this Neanderthal genetic signal was higher in North African populations whose ancestors had relatively little recent interbreeding with modern Near Eastern or European peoples. That suggests the signal came directly from ancient mixing with Neanderthals, and not recent interbreeding with other modern humans whose ancestors might have interbred with Neanderthals.

"The only modern populations without Neanderthal admixture are the sub-Saharan groups," said researcher Carles Lalueza-Fox, a paleogeneticist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at Barcelona, Spain.

The researchers say their findings do not suggest that Neanderthals entered Africa and made intimate contact with ancient North Africans. Rather, "what we are saying is that the contact took place outside Africa, likely in the Near East, and that there was a back migration into Africa of some groups that peopled North Africa, likely replacing or assimilating some ancestral populations," Lalueza-Fox told LiveScience.

This research also suggests that North African groups were not the source of the out-of-Africa migrations. Rather, other groups, perhaps out of East Africa, might have led this diaspora.
The scientists detailed their findings Oct. 17 in the journal PLoS ONE.

Some Evidence that 'Neanderthal' Used Feathers as Decoration

Story at Physorg.com

Researchers find evidence that suggests Neanderthals used feathers to adorn themselves September 19, 2012 by Bob Yirka

Phys.org)—Using objects obtained for the express purpose of adornment is a trait found only in humans, though some have speculated that our early cousins, the Neanderthals, might have done so as well. Some prior research has shown that some groups of them might have used eagle claws as a type of jewelry, while others have suggested they might have tied feathers together and worn them as a headdress, such as native Americans did. But, until now, no clear evidence had been presented to give credence to such theories. In this new effort a group made up of researchers from several different countries looked at the available evidence regarding wing bones and determined that it appears likely that Neanderthals did, as they report in their paper in PLoS ONE, use long wing feathers as a means of adornment.

Finding evidence that supports the notion that Neanderthals used feathers to adorn themselves is more than a simple matter of interest, doing so also offers evidence that indicates that the hominins possessed a higher degree of intelligence than has been assumed; and if that is the case, the question of why they died out as we prospered becomes even more difficult to answer.

To find evidence of feather adornment, the researchers first looked at the massive amount of data that has been collected on both birds and Neanderthals, specifically regarding their geography and whether birds with long feathers even lived in the areas where Neanderthals roamed. In all, they studied data from 1,699 sites across Eurasia and found that there was indeed a correlation and that there appeared to be a lot of raptor and corvid species living in the same areas as Neanderthals.

The team then turned their attention to actual bird bones found around or near Neanderthal archeological finds and discovered that many of them were wing bones that had been manipulated with sharp stones, causing cutting marks, a clear indication that they had been used for some purpose other than as food as wings don't have any meat on them. They noted also that the Neanderthals appeared to have a preference for birds with dark feathers. Also, they found that marked bones were found at many of the sites indicating that whatever was going on wasn't local. These findings indicate that Neanderthals were clearly using the long wing feathers for something, and the logical conclusion is that it was for adornment, as that was what humans tended to do with them.

The team's findings don't prove that Neanderthals adorned themselves with feathers, of course, but it does offer strong evidence, and because of that, more research will likely focus on other advanced intellectual abilities of Neanderthals, and whether there was some other characteristic they possessed that might have led to their demise.

More information:

Finlayson C, Brown K, Blasco R, Rosell J, Negro JJ, et al. (2012) Birds of a Feather: Neanderthal Exploitation of Raptors and Corvids. PLoS ONE 7(9): e45927. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045927

Abstract

The hypothesis that Neanderthals exploited birds for the use of their feathers or claws as personal ornaments in symbolic behaviour is revolutionary as it assigns unprecedented cognitive abilities to these hominins. This inference, however, is based on modest faunal samples and thus may not represent a regular or systematic behaviour. Here we address this issue by looking for evidence of such behaviour across a large temporal and geographical framework. Our analyses try to answer four main questions: 1) does a Neanderthal to raptor-corvid connection exist at a large scale, thus avoiding associations that might be regarded as local in space or time?; 2) did Middle (associated with Neanderthals) and Upper Palaeolithic (associated with modern humans) sites contain a greater range of these species than Late Pleistocene paleontological sites?; 3) is there a taphonomic association between Neanderthals and corvids-raptors at Middle Palaeolithic sites on Gibraltar, specifically Gorham's, Vanguard and Ibex Caves? and; 4) was the extraction of wing feathers a local phenomenon exclusive to the Neanderthals at these sites or was it a geographically wider phenomenon?. We compiled a database of 1699 Pleistocene Palearctic sites based on fossil bird sites. We also compiled a taphonomical database from the Middle Palaeolithic assemblages of Gibraltar. We establish a clear, previously unknown and widespread, association between Neanderthals, raptors and corvids. We show that the association involved the direct intervention of Neanderthals on the bones of these birds, which we interpret as evidence of extraction of large flight feathers. The large number of bones, the variety of species processed and the different temporal periods when the behaviour is observed, indicate that this was a systematic, geographically and temporally broad, activity that the Neanderthals undertook. Our results, providing clear evidence that Neanderthal cognitive capacities were comparable to those of Modern Humans, constitute a major advance in the study of human evolution.

Journal reference:

PLoS ONE © 2012 Phys.org

More on the Deciphering of DNA of Denisovan - Girl!

From BBC News - always so well written!

31 August 2012 Last updated at 02:17 ET

DNA of girl from Denisova cave gives up genetic secrets

By Helen Briggs BBC News

The DNA of a cave girl who lived about 80,000 years ago has been analysed in remarkable detail.

The picture of her genome is as accurate as that of modern day human genomes, and shows she had brown eyes, hair and skin.

The research in Science also sheds new light on the genetic differences between modern humans and their closest extinct relatives.

The cave dweller, a Denisovan, was a cousin of the Neanderthals.

Both groups of ancient humans died out about 30,000 years ago, but have left their mark in the gene pool of modern people.
Shadowy past
The Denisovans have mysterious origins. They appear to have left little behind for palaeontologists save a tiny finger bone and a wisdom tooth found in Siberia's Denisova cave in 2010.

Though some researchers have proposed a possible link between the Denisovans and human fossils from China that have previously been difficult to classify.

A Russian scientist sent a fragment of the bone from Siberia to a team led by Svante Paabo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

He thought it might belong to an early modern human, but the results came as a surprise.

DNA analysis revealed a human who was neither a Neanderthal nor a modern human but the first of a new group of ancient humans.

Gene catalogue

Dr Paabo's team has now sequenced the genome of the Denisovan in much greater depth, using a new technique for studying ancient DNA.

The quality of the genome sequence is similar to that seen in genome studies of modern day humans.

"This is an extinct genome sequence of unprecedented accuracy," said Dr Matthias Meyer, the chief researcher on the study.

"For most of the genome we can even determine the differences between the two sets of chromosomes that the Denisovan girl inherited from her mother and father."

The scientists compared the girl's genome with that of Neanderthals and 11 modern humans from around the world.

This allowed them to catalogue the gene changes that make modern humans different from the two groups of extinct humans that were their closest relatives.

They include changes to only a single DNA letter in several genes involved in the wiring of the brain and nervous system, as well as those that affect the eye and the skin. [Emphasis added].

Dr Paabo said further investigation of changes in genes involved in connecting up the brain will be exciting to pursue.

He told BBC News: "To me the most exciting thing is having a good genome from our very closest extinct relatives which we can now compare ourselves to.

"It's a catalogue of what makes everyone on the planet unique compared with our closest extinct relatives."

The most detailed genetic analysis yet of the Denisovans also confirms that they bred with the ancestors of some people alive today, the researchers said.

It shows that about 3% of the genes of people living today in Papua New Guinea come from Denisovans, with a trace of their DNA lingering in the Han and Dai people from mainland China. [Emphasis added].

The genetic variation of Denisovans was very low, suggesting that although they were found in large parts of Asia their population remained small.


No matter what they say, like breeds with like to produce not only viable but also fertile offspring!  I probably will not live to see it, but someday scientists will inevitably acknowledge that so-called Neanderthal, Denisovan and Modern humans were all grapes from the same vine, making not only reproduction possible, but also producing offspring capable of producing offspring of their own.  That is the key - capable of producing offspring of their own.  Fertility.  I'm thinking that in the final analysis, a lot more DNA resemblance among the three "species" science continues to insist exist in humans will also be found as we get more sophisticated at recognizing an decoding "sequences."  I probably won't live to see that, either.  But there's hope.  There is always hope.

Wait a minute -- they did mate after all...

Now, the latest latest study indicates that so-called Neanderthal and so-called modern humans did mate after all, and the timing is consistent with what the prior prior study hypothesized, contrary to the latest prior study that was published in PNAS recently but is actually over 2 years old, evidently.  All very confusing, to be sure!  Suffice to say this is not the last on the topic; so far there are two studies that favor the "mating" theory and one that says nope, it wasn't mating at all, it was a common ancestor whose genetic material somehow only made it into some of the "modern" humans in Africa, but not others.  Okaaaaayyyy...  Please explain to me in plain English how this could happen. That makes no sense to me at all, but then, how does it make sense to say that the farther away in time we get from our ancestors the less diverse our populations become?  What?  But that's the line of thought these days.  Totally counter-intuitive, heh? 

At Smithsonian.com

August 15, 2012

Neanderthal and Human Matings Get a Date

Two years ago the analysis of the Neanderthal genome revealed modern humans carry Neanderthal DNA, implying our ancestors mated with Neanderthals at some point in the past. Scientists only found genetic traces of Neanderthals in non-African people, leading to the conclusion that Neanderthal-human matings must have occurred as modern humans left Africa and populated the rest of the world. A new paper (PDF) posted on arXiv.org puts a date on those matings: 47,000 to 65,000 years ago—a time that does indeed correspond with human migrations out of Africa.

Sriram Sankararaman of Harvard Medical School and colleagues—including Svante Pääbo of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and Harvard’s David Reich—investigated the timing of the matings in part to verify that the trysts even happened at all. That’s because there’s an alternative explanation for why up to 4 percent of non-African human DNA looks like Neanderthal DNA. It’s possible, the researchers explain, that the ancestral species that gave rise to both humans and Neanderthals had a genetically subdivided population—in other words, genetic variation wasn’t evenly distributed across the species. Under that scenario, Neanderthals and the modern humans that left Africa might have independently inherited similar DNA from a part of the divided ancestral population that didn’t contribute genetic material to modern African populations. (Another paper published this week, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, considers this scenario.)

To determine what really happened, Sankararaman’s team looked at rates of genetic change to estimate when Neanderthals and humans last exchanged genes. If the shared DNA was due to interbreeding, the team expected to find a date less than 100,000 years ago—some time after humans left Africa. But if it was the result of sharing a common ancestor, they expected a date older than 230,000 years ago, approximately when Neanderthals and modern humans split from each other. The team’s findings support the interbreeding scenario: 47,000 to 65,000 years ago.

Neanderthals aren’t the only archaic species that may have contributed to the modern human gene pool. Denisovans, known from only a tooth and a finger bone, left a genetic mark in people living in Melanesia and Southeast Asia. And recent genetic evidence suggests that some ancient African populations mated with an unidentified, now-extinct hominid species that lived in Africa.

So far, our knowledge of Neanderthal and Denisovan genetics comes from only a few individuals, so our understanding of interspecies mating is likely to change as more Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA is analyzed.
(H/T John Hawks)

Posted By: Erin Wayman — Africa,Homo,Interbreeding,Migrations,Modern Humans,Neanderthals,Pleistocene

Who Has What at Stake in Keeping Neanderthal an "Ape Man?"

Is this a case of follow the money?  Or follow the academic reputation(s) at stake?  Will the 19th century line of reasoning about where we came from and how we got here take over the top once again?  Or will the 21st century view propelled by new technologies and new views ultimately prevail?

13 August 2012 Last updated at 15:43 ET

Neanderthal breeding idea doubted

By Jonathan Ball BBC News

Similarities between the DNA of modern people and Neanderthals are more likely to have arisen from shared ancestry than interbreeding, a study reports.

That is according to research carried out at the University of Cambridge and published this week in PNAS journal.
Previously, it had been suggested that shared parts of the genomes of these two populations were the result of interbreeding.
However, the newly published research proposes a different explanation.
The origin of modern humans is a hotly debated topic; four main theories have arisen to describe the evolution of Homo sapiens.
All argue for an African origin, but an important distinction in these competing theories is whether or not interbreeding - or "hybridisation" - occurred between Homo sapiens and other members of the genus Homo.
In the current study, Cambridge evolutionary biologists Dr Anders Eriksson and Dr Andrea Manica used computer simulations to reassess the strength of evidence supporting hybridisation events.
They argue that the amount of DNA shared between modern Eurasian humans and Neanderthals - estimated at between 1-4% - can be explained if both arose from a geographically isolated population, most likely in North Africa, which shared a common ancestor around 300-350 thousand years ago.
When modern humans expanded out of Africa, around 60-70,000 years ago, they took that genetic similarity with them.
By contrast, previous ancient DNA studies of Neanderthal remains have shown that their genomes harbour genetic signatures - polymorphisms - that are also seen in the genomes of modern Europeans, East Asians and Oceanians (from Papua New Guinea) but not in modern African populations.
The findings challenged previously held views - based on several lines of evidence - that modern humans had replaced the Neanderthals with little or no gene flow occurring between the two groups.

The observations from the Neanderthal genome led some evolutionary biologists to argue that this genetic similarity had arisen through hybridisation between Neanderthals - already resident in Europe and western Asia - and the ancestors of present-day non-Africans.
Prof David Reich, from Harvard University in Cambridge, US - an exponent of the hybridisation theory - is not convinced that the data represents a powerful argument against interbreeding.
By using methods that are able to differentiate between genetic similarity caused by gene flow via hybridisation vs shared ancestry, he argues that "the patterns observed [in our analyses] are exactly what one would expect from recent gene flow" - a view shared by his collaborator Professor Svante Paabo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Prof Reich went on to say that their data shows that Neanderthals and non-Africans last exchanged genetic material 47-65,000 years ago.

Is Some Cave Art 'Neanderthal?'

I hesitated to write anything about the recent flurry of articles, most rather sensationalized, in the news about some re-dating of existing cave art/drawings using a new dating technique, because the writers generally talk about Neanderthal as if she were some ape-woman throw-back instead of a human being capable of interbreeding successful with so-called "homo sapiens sapiens."  In fact, the interbreeding was so successful that even today, perhaps 32,000 to 27,000 years after the last of anatomical 'Neanderthal' disappeared (but we really do not know for sure when the last of them "died off"), their genes are some of our genes.  So who, indeed, is "homo sapiens sapiens?"

I think people, including the experts, keep forgetting that we are still very much in the infancy of discovering a more complete picture about the past herstory of Earth and her people.  It seems that absolute-ism still exists in abundance in certain circles, and there is still a clinging to 19th century "theories" (more correctly, hypotheses) that modern scientifically vetted evidence has discredited with respect to "evolution" (that so took us down the wrong tracks!)  My hope is that as we develop more and better techniques for analyzing the age of objects and things that are not carbon-based, and more and better techniques for analyzing and interpreting the meaning of DNA sequences, we will finally kiss goodbye to the 19th century once and for all.  At least, in our quest for historical, archaeological and scientific knowledge of who we are and where we came from.  All bets are off when it comes to our political and "moral" (ahem) culture, which seems to be going full-tilt in a backward direction.  Sigh.

I found this resource, which presents the least sensationalized reports on the most recent study regarding dating of various examples of cave art.  And, yes, it is true that there is a time period overlap of many thousands of years between the new dates (ages) assigned to certain samples of cave art, the existence of so-called Neanderthal throughout Europe and the suspected arrival of so-called modern man in Europe.  So -- who did the art?  Are you really sure about that?

At Science Magazine (sciencemag.org)

Science 15 June 2012:
Vol. 336 no. 6087 pp. 1409-1413
DOI: 10.1126/science.1219957

• Research Article

U-Series Dating of Paleolithic Art in 11 Caves in Spain

1. A. W. G. Pike¹,*,
2. D. L. Hoffmann²,³,
3. M. García-Diez⁴,
4. P. B. Pettitt⁵,
5. J. Alcolea⁶,
6. R. De Balbín⁶,
7. C. González-Sainz⁷,
8. C. de las Heras⁸,
9. J. A. Lasheras⁸,
10. R. Montes⁸,
11. J. Zilhão⁹

+ Author Affiliations

1. ¹Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol, 43 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UU, UK.
2. ²Bristol Isotope Group, School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol BS8 1SS, UK.
3. ³Centro Nacional de Investigatión sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), Paseo Sierra de Atapuerca s/n, 09002 Burgos, Spain.
4. ⁴Department of Geography, Prehistory and Archaeology, University of Basque Country (UPV/EHU), c/ Tomás y Valiente s/n, 01006 Vitoria,Spain.
5. ⁵Department of Archaeology, University of Sheffield, Northgate House, West Street, Sheffield S1 4ET, UK.
6. ⁶Prehistory Section, University of Alcalá de Henares, c/ Colegios 2, 28801 Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain.
7. ⁷Department of Historic Sciences, University of Cantabria, Avenida Los Castros s/n, 39005 Santander, Spain.
8. ⁸Museo Nacional y Centro de Investigación de Altamira. 39330 Santillana del Mar, Cantabria, Spain.
9. ⁹University of Barcelona/Institució Catalana de Reserca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Departament de Prehistòria, Història Antiga i Arqueologia (SERP), c/ Montalegre 6, 08001 Barcelona, Spain.

1. ↵*To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: alistair.pike@bristol.ac.uk

Abstract

Paleolithic cave art is an exceptional archive of early human symbolic behavior, but because obtaining reliable dates has been difficult, its chronology is still poorly understood after more than a century of study. We present uranium-series disequilibrium dates of calcite deposits overlying or underlying art found in 11 caves, including the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage sites of Altamira, El Castillo, and Tito Bustillo, Spain. The results demonstrate that the tradition of decorating caves extends back at least to the Early Aurignacian period, with minimum ages of 40.8 thousand years for a red disk, 37.3 thousand years for a hand stencil, and 35.6 thousand years for a claviform-like symbol. These minimum ages reveal either that cave art was a part of the cultural repertoire of the first anatomically modern humans in Europe or that perhaps Neandertals also engaged in painting caves.

• Received for publication 1 February 2012.
• Accepted for publication 25 April 2012.

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How Old are the Bones of Atapuerca Cavern?

From The Guardian
by Robin McKie
June 9, 2012

Briton says Spanish researchers are out by 200,000 years and have even got the wrong species

It is the world's biggest haul of human fossils and the most important palaeontology site in Europe: a subterranean chamber at the bottom of a 50ft shaft in the deepest recesses of the Atapuerca cavern in northern Spain. Dozens of ancient skeletons have been unearthed.

La Sima de los Huesos – the Pit of Bones – has been designated a Unesco world heritage site because of its importance to understanding evolution, and millions of euros, donated by the EU, have been spent constructing a museum of human antiquity in nearby Burgos.

But Britain's leading expert on human evolution, Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, has warned in the journal Evolutionary Anthropology that the team in charge of La Sima has got the ages of its fossils wrong by 200,000 years and has incorrectly identified the species of ancient humans found there.

Far from being a 600,000-year-old lair of a species called Homo heidelbergensis, he believes the pit is filled with Neanderthal remains that are no more than 400,000 years old. The difference in interpretation has crucial implications for understanding human evolution.

"The Atapuerca finds are hugely important," said Stringer. "There is no other site like it in terms of numbers of bones and skulls of our ancient predecessors. It is the world's biggest collection of ancient human fossils and the team there has done a magnificent job in excavating the site. However, if we cannot correctly fix the age and identity of the remains then we are in trouble. Getting that wrong even affects how we construct our own evolution."

La Sima de los Huesos was discovered by potholers exploring Atapuerca's cavern system. One brought back a few fragments of human bone. Excavations led by Juan Luis Arsuaga, of Madrid university, began in 1990 and within two years had uncovered two complete human brain cases. Ribcages, leg bones and jawbones were also dug up. Arsuaga tentatively dated the finds as being 300,000 years old.

Since then, the remains of 28 bodies have been dug up, the world's greatest single haul of ancient human fossils. During this time, Arsuaga and his team pushed back the dates of their finds to 600,000 years ago and assigned them as belonging to Homo heidelbergensis.

This dating and identification has caused increasing upset among other palaeontologists. The scientists at La Sima believe H heidelbergensis is an ancestor of Neanderthals but not of Homo sapiens. However, others, including Stringer, believe it is indeed an ancestor of our species.

"The problem is that many of the skeletons unearthed at La Sima clearly have Neanderthal features," said Stringer. "In particular, their teeth and jaws are shaped very like those of Neanderthals. But all other evidence indicated Neanderthals did not appear on the scene for another 200,000 years. Dating these bones to such an early date completely distorts our picture of our evolution."

This criticism is supported by Phillip Endicott of the Musée de l'Homme, Paris. His studies of human and Neanderthal DNA have shown the latter did not appear as a separate species until 400,000 years ago. "Yet the bones in La Sima, which bear Neanderthal features, are supposed to be 600,000 years old," he said. "This cannot be true."

Another criticism is of the method used to date the Pit of Bones. A stalagmite found just above the remains has been dated as 600,000 years old, using natural uranium isotopes, and Sima scientists argue that the fossils must be older. They say the 28 bodies were thrown into the pit as an act of reverence for the dead and that the stalagmite grew over the sediment containing the bones.

However, this interpretation is controversial. No one has found any other evidence of ceremonial behaviour in humans of that antiquity. In addition, there is a deficit of small finger and toe bones. "If complete bodies were thrown in there, you would expect to see every piece of human anatomy down there," said Stringer. "But you don't. A lot of skeletal parts seem to be missing."

Yolanda Fernández-Jalvo and Peter Andrews, of, respectively, the Natural History Museums of Madrid and London, suggest the absence of small bones is best explained by assuming the bodies came from the cave system and were washed there by flood. Fingers and toes would have been lost as skeletons were swept into the pit where the stalagmite could already have formed.

However, Arsuaga has rejected this analysis. "You can call [the fossils] early Neanderthals or give them another name, it does not matter. I prefer to give a different name." But he admitted the 600,000-year age his team had put on the Sima fossils did look too early. "We are working on that," he said.

**********************************************

I ditto this comment made at The Guardian website at the end of the story:

imipak

10 June 2012 1:50AM

There are five known species of human at this point. If find X doesn't fit any of the five models, it is only rational to consider they may be up to six. That isn't rocket science.

They can, of course, solve the problem. Permanently. The have teeth and bones. Sacrifice a few, multiply up the DNA signature, subtract potential modern contamination (well-established procedures for this) and sequence what is left.

We are NOT living in Victorian times. We are NOT dependent on morphology, and much genetic work has gone into utterly discrediting the morphological analysis as not worth a damn.

For as long as scientists bicker, rather than study, I am left with the conclusion they don't want the results. We do what we value. If the scientists valued knowing over point-scoring, they would have resolved the issue before anyone ever realized there was one.

They did not. Ergo, they value pompous, self-cented ignorance above getting any credible work done.

Both teams are entitled to prove me wrong - all they have to do is pool funds, produce the sequence and publish it. With modern technology, that will cost around $4,000 US and will take around a week. If their unis wont fund it, they can pay for it themselves. It's cheaper than anything they've done so far and they CANNOT do the next right thing if they don't know what they are trying to do the next right thing about is.

Ancient 'Neanderthal' Navigators

From New Scientist
Neanderthals were ancient mariners

• 29 February 2012 by Michael Marshall
• Magazine issue 2854.

IT LOOKS like Neanderthals may have beaten modern humans to the seas. Growing evidence suggests our extinct cousins criss-crossed the Mediterranean in boats from 100,000 years ago - though not everyone is convinced they weren't just good swimmers.

Neanderthals lived around the Mediterranean from 300,000 years ago. Their distinctive "Mousterian" stone tools are found on the Greek mainland and, intriguingly, have also been found on the Greek islands of Lefkada, Kefalonia and Zakynthos. That could be explained in two ways: either the islands weren't islands at the time, or our distant cousins crossed the water somehow.

Now, George Ferentinos of the University of Patras in Greece says we can rule out the former. The islands, he says, have been cut off from the mainland for as long as the tools have been on them.

Ferentinos compiled data that showed sea levels were 120 metres lower 100,000 years ago, because water was locked up in Earth's larger ice caps. But the seabed off Greece today drops down to around 300 metres, meaning that when Neanderthals were in the region, the sea would have been at least 180 metres deep (Journal of Archaeological Science, DOI: 10.1016/j.jas.2012.01.032).

Ferentinos thinks Neanderthals had a seafaring culture for tens of thousands of years. Modern humans are thought to have taken to the seas just 50,000 years ago, on crossing to Australia.

The journeys to the Greek islands from the mainland were quite short - 5 to 12 kilometres - but according to Thomas Strasser of Providence College in Rhode Island, the Neanderthals didn't stop there. In 2008 he found similar stone tools on Crete, which he says are at least 130,000 years old. Crete has been an island for some 5 million years and is 40 kilometres from its closest neighbour - suggesting far more ambitious journeys.

Strasser agrees Neanderthals were seafaring long before modern humans, in the Mediterranean at least. He thinks early hominins made much more use of the sea than anyone suspects, and may have used the seas as a highway, rather than seeing them as a barrier. But the details remain lost in history. Any craft were presumably made from wood, so rotted away long ago. The oldest known Mediterranean boat, a dugout canoe from Lake Bracciano in Italy, is just 7000 years old. Ferentinos speculates that Neanderthals may have made something similar.

There is a simpler explanation for how they reached the islands, says Paul Pettitt of the University of Sheffield, UK: maybe they just swam there. Pettitt also points out that the tools on the islands have not been chemically dated, so estimates of their age are based entirely on their design.

Even if Ferentinos is right, the Neanderthals were probably not the first hominin seafarers. One million-year-old stone tools have been found on the Indonesian island of Flores (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature 08844). Something, perhaps primitive Homo erectus, crossed the sea to Flores before Neanderthals even evolved. ["Evolved?"]