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Most people alive today carry traces of genes inherited from Neanderthals -- the enduring legacy of prehistoric hookups with our extinct cousins. But researchers have long debated when and where that mingling happened, and whether these were one-off romps or commonplace trysts. Now, an analysis of ancient and modern genomes suggests contemporary people's Neanderthal DNA came from a single, prolonged period of mixing some 47,000 years ago...To do that, Priya Moorjani, a population geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, and colleagues analyzed previously sequenced genomes from 59 ancient H. sapiens, mostly from Western Europe and Asia, dating from between...

A team of archaeologists in Spain has applied a new dating technique to more precisely determine the intervals between hearth fires from the Paleolithic Age.This research, published in the journal Nature, reveals that the hearths at El Salt, a Paleolithic site, were used over 200 years with intervals of decades between uses. This suggests that Neanderthals returned to this site over multiple generations, challenging previous assumptions about their mobility and settlement patterns...a novel combination of archaeomagnetic and archaeostratigraphic analyses... leverages the magnetic properties of minerals in the fire pits to record the orientation of the Earth's magnetic field at the...

This week, Harrison Butker, a player on the Kansas City Chiefs football team gave a commencement speech at Benedictine College--a small Catholic liberal arts college in Atchison, Kansas. In this speech Butker said to the women graduates "some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world." USA Today featured a column denouncing Butker's "extremist, Neanderthal views." On ABC's The View, the panelists chastised Butker for "not following the example of...

The oldest human viruses, including herpes, have been uncovered in 50,000-year-old Neanderthal bones - and experts could soon recreate them. Researchers at Brazil's Federal University of São Paulo identified remnants of the herpesviruses, which causes cold sores, the sexually transmitted papillomavirus and adenovirus, also known as the common cold, in two male Neanderthals' DNA found in a Russian cave. Previous theories suggested that Neanderthals may have gone extinct because of viruses and the latest study may be the first to provide evidence for this idea. Now, the team hopes to synthesize the viruses and infect human cells in a lab...

In 2018, a female Neanderthal was discovered in the Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. Now, archaeologists from The University of Cambridge have unveiled the reconstructed face of the 75,000-year-old woman, based on the assembly of hundreds of individual bone fragments recovered during excavations. “Neanderthals have had a bad press ever since the first ones were found over 150 years ago,” said Professor Graeme Barker from Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, who led the excavation at the cave where the woman’s remains were discovered. Neanderthals are believed to have become extinct around 40,000 years ago, and discoveries of their remains...

An UdeM study unveils fresh insights into how Neanderthals and Homo sapiens organized their living spaces at the Riparo Bombrini site in northern Italy.How did our Paleolithic ancestors go about organizing their living spaces?...far from being more primitive, Neanderthals did much the same as their Homo sapiens successors: made themselves at home.Analyzing artifacts and features of the Protoaurignacian and Mousterian levels of the Riparo Bombrini site in northwestern Italy, the scientists uncovered common patterns of settlement between the two populations.By mapping the distribution of stone tools, animal bones, ochre, and marine shells across the surface of the site, they were...

Psalm 73:25-26 (King James Version) Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever. President McGoo goes to the border and calls anyone who questions Global Warming Neanderthals. The irony of someone who is obviously deep into senility calling Trump a Neanderthal is rich. Everyone knows the reason he was there was to take some of the cameras off Trump when in reality he put more on him and his obvious attempt...

Cover Photo: An artist’s reconstruction shows how a Neanderthal could hold a stone artifact with an adhesive handle. Daniela Greiner ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ More than 40,000 years ago, Neanderthals in what is now France used a multi-component adhesive to make handles for stone tools. They produced a sophisticated mixture of ochre and bitumen, two raw materials that had to be procured from the wider region. This is the earliest discovery of a multi-component adhesive in Europe to date. This complex adhesive found on Neanderthal stone tools has given researchers new insights into the intelligence of this extinct human species. The work, reported...

"The Ranis cave site provides evidence for the first dispersal of Homo sapiens across the higher latitudes of Europe. It turns out that stone artifacts that were thought to be produced by Neanderthals were, in fact, part of the early Homo sapiens toolkit," said Jean-Jacque Hublin, a professor at the Collège de France in Paris and the former director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology where Zavala first began this work. "This fundamentally changes our previous knowledge about the period: Homo sapiens reached northwestern Europe long before Neanderthal disappearance in southwestern Europe."

Straight-tusked elephants were the largest land mammals of the Pleistocene epoch, present in Europe and western Asia between 800,000 and 100,000 years ago.These animals had a very wide head and extremely long tusks, and were roughly three times larger than that of living Asian elephants, twice that of African ones, and also much larger than woolly mammoths.Estimates of maximum shoulder height vary from 3 to 4.2 m (10-14 feet) and body mass from 4.5 to 13 tons for females and males, respectively."We have estimated that the meat and fat supplied by the body of an adult Palaeoloxodon antiquus bull would...

Whether you’re a morning person has long been tied to personality, but new research suggests DNA inherited from our extinct Neanderthal cousins ups the chance we’re early risers. Our circadian rhythms—the biological clocks inside our cells that time when we sleep and wake—are linked to countless genes. Now researchers say they have found that bits of genetic code passed down to some of us from Neanderthals relate to our sleeping habits in the present day. The study was published Thursday in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution. “We’ve found many Neanderthal variants that consistently associate with a propensity for being...

Modern Europeans have a smaller proportion of Neanderthal genes in their genomes than East Asians do. New research suggests the reason lies at the feet of migrating early farmers.A wave of migrating farmers from the ancient Middle East may be the reason why modern Europeans don't carry as much Neanderthal DNA as today's East Asians do, a new study finds.All humans with ancestry from outside of Africa have a little bit of Neanderthal in them — about 2% of the genome, on average. But people with East Asian ancestry have between 8% and 24% more Neanderthal genes than people of...

The oldest layers of the Gruta de Oliveira, which includes a number of passages, date back to about 120,000 years ago, the most recent to about 40,000: It is believed that Neanderthals inhabited this place between 100,000 and 70,000 years ago...In this case however, what caught the attention of archaeologists were the traces of hearths intentionally built and used in the cave. The archaeologists found about a dozen hearths at various stratigraphic levels in an excavation area of about 30 square meters and six meters deep. The unmistakable basin-like, circular structures were filled with remains.Findings from inside and near the...

...we find the now inhospitable and hyper-arid zone of the southern Jordan Rift Valley was frequently lush and well-watered in the past.Our evidence suggests this valley had a riverine and wetland zone that would have provided ideal passage... out of Africa and deep into the Levant and Arabia...Our findings from sedimentary sections ranging 5 to 12 metres in thickness showed ecosystem fluctuations over time, including cycles of dry and humid environments. We also found evidence for the presence of ancient rivers and wetlands.Luminescence dating showed the sedimentary environments formed between 125,000 and 43,000 years ago, suggesting there had been multiple...

They used to live in caves, hunt their food and were generally tougher than modern-day humans. But a new study finds if you have Neanderthal genes, you are twice as likely to develop a life-threatening form of Covid. DNA from the species that went extinct around 40,000 years ago is associated with autoimmune diseases, type 2 diabetes and prostate cancer. A team of Italian researchers found people with three Neanderthal gene variations were twice as likely to have severe pneumonia and three times as likely to be hospitalized with a ventilator after contracting the virus. While the findings were part...

Radiocarbon dating is the most widely applied dating method in archaeology, especially in human evolution studies, where it is used to determine the chronology of key events, such as the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans in Europe. However, the method does not always provide precise and accurate enough ages to understand the important processes of human evolution. Here we review the newest method developments in radiocarbon dating ('Radiocarbon 3.0'), which can lead us to much better chronologies and understanding of the major events in recent human evolution. As an example, we apply these new methods to discuss the dating...

Researchers created a facial approximation of a 45,000-year-old individual who is believed to be the oldest anatomically modern human ever to be genetically sequenced. In 1950, archaeologists discovered a severed skull buried deep inside a cave system in Czechia (the Czech Republic). Because the skull was split in half, researchers concluded that the skeletal remains were of two separate individuals. However, through genome sequencing done decades later, scientists concluded that the skull actually belonged to a single person: a woman who lived 45,000 years ago. Researchers named her the Zlatý kůň woman, or "golden horse" in Czech, in a nod...

Archaeologists have unearthed the oldest large collection of wooden tools made by humans at a site in Schöningen, Germany. The artefacts date back to about 300,000 years ago.Included in what ancient people left behind are wooden spears and shorter throwing sticks that have been sharpened at both ends. It is unclear exactly which hominin is responsible for producing the tools, but their age suggests either Homo heidelbergensis or Homo neanderthalensis...The 300,000-year-old tools found at Schöningen were analysed using micro-CT scanning, 3D microscopy and infrared spectroscopy to better understand how they were made and their potential uses. The results are published...

Long before the invention of agriculture, humans already knew how to process cereals and other wild plants into a flour suitable for food—and now there's new evidence they did so long before scientists was previously thought.Published in Quaternary Science Reviews, an Italian-led study of five ancient grindstones from around 39,000 to 43,000 years ago shows that milling for food dates back to the transitional period between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens...The Neanderthal-to-Homo sapiens period was characterized by the coexistence of the Late Mousterian (Neanderthal), Uluzzian and Protoaurignacian (H. sapiens) techno-complexes in the northwest and southwest of present-day Italy.The grindstones come from...

A team from the University of Tours analyzed marks found on a wall in La Roche-Cotard cave in the French region of Centre-Val de Loire.Based on these engravings' shape, spacing and arrangement, the team concluded they were deliberate, organized and intentional shapes created by Neanderthal fingers drawing making indents on a soft surface.By analyzing sediment found at the site, they worked out that the cave had become closed off around 57,000 years ago as rocks and debris filled it up.Writing in the journal Plos One, the team said this dates the 'finger fluting' to well before Homo sapiens became established...