Could the first Maltese have been Neanderthals?
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The Times of Malta ^
| June 19, 2016 | Ivan Martin
Maltese prehistory may have just been extended by 30,000 years. The
verdict of experts from the London Natural History Museum has revived the theory that a tooth discovered in Għar Dalam in 1917 may prove Neanderthals once roamed the island. The claim is not new. It was made in the 1920s by two British anthropologists, but four decades later the theory no longer had credence. “Anyone who wrote a history book from 1964 till today will say there were never any Neanderthals on Malta. According to them, the first people to come here were Sicilian farmers around 7,000 years ago,”...
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How did the last Neanderthals live?
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Archaeology via BBC Future ^
| January 29, 2020 | By Melissa Hogenboom
In many ways, the last surviving Neanderthals are a mystery. But
four caves in Gibraltar have given an unprecedented insight into what their lives might have been like. Forty thousand years ago in Europe, we were not the only human species alive – there were at least three others. Many of us are familiar with one of these, the Neanderthals. Fossil evidence shows that, towards the end, the final few were clinging onto survival in places like Gibraltar. In recognition of this, Gibraltar received Unesco world heritage status in 2016. ... "They weren't just surviving," the Gibraltar museum's director of...
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Neanderthals Were Human Too
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Christian Post ^
| 09/28/2018 | s John Stonestreet And G. Shane Morris
REUTERS/NIKOLA SOLICThe picture above showcases the typical life of a Neanderthal family in a cave. If
someone called you a Neanderthal, you wouldn't take it as a compliment. But according to the latest paleoanthropology, it's not that bad.In one of my favorite commercial series, Geico features a Neanderthal living in the modern world, constantly getting offended at the way people talk about cavemen like they're stupid. This Pleistocene holdover, you see, is sophisticated, sensitive, more likely to visit a club than to hit you with one.It's no wonder he had a hard time in the modern world. From the...
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New Thoughts on Neanderthals' Diet
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Archaeology ^
| Wednesday, January 2, 2019 | editors
The levels of nitrogen-15 in Neanderthal bones are so high that they suggest the early human relatives ate more meat than do carnivores such as hyenas. According
to a Science News report, paleobiologist Kimberly Foecke of George Washington University thinks those high levels of nitrogen-15 might be due to the condition of the meat that Neanderthals consumed. To check the levels of nitrogen in rotting meat, Foecke left steaks cut from animals that had been raised without hormones or antibiotics outside in a box covered with mesh, and sampled them daily for 16 days. Preliminary results suggest that the levels...
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Neanderthals Listened to the World Much Like Us
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The New York Times ^
| March 1, 2021 | Sabrina Imbler
If you were somehow able to travel back in time some 130,000 years and chance upon a Neanderthal, you might find yourself telling them about some of humanity’s greatest inventions, such as spanakopita and TikTok. The Neanderthal would have no idea what you were saying, much less talking about, but they might
be able to hear you perfectly, picking up on the voiceless consonants “t,” “k” and “s” that appear in many modern human languages
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John Hawks - Who were the ancestors of the Neanderthals?
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Gorham's Cave Gibraltar on YouTube ^
| September 2018, February 11, 2019 | John Hawks
The last 10 years have transformed the evidence concerning the early origins and evolution of Neanderthal populations. Genetic
comparisons of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancient DNA suggest that the common ancestor of these populations separated from African ancestors of modern humans prior to 600,000 years ago, followed by a rapid differentiation in Eurasia. Later, additional episodes of gene flow brought genes into Neanderthal populations, including the mtDNA clade carried by all later Neanderthals. Yet, a number of western Eurasian fossil samples from the time between 600,000 and 100,000 years ago are difficult to accommodate within the category of "Neanderthals", including European...
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How Neanderthals adjusted to climate change
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Archaeology News Network 'blog (from PLOS ONE) ^
| August 28, 2020 | University of Erlangen-Nuremberg
The two researchers investigated artefacts from one of the most important Neanderthal sites in Central Europe, the Sesselfelsgrotte cave in Lower Bavaria... 'The technical repertoire used to create Keilmesser is not only direct proof of the advanced planning skills of our extinct relatives, but also a strategical reaction to the restrictions imposed
upon them by adverse natural conditions,' says Uthmeier, FAU professor for Early Prehistory and Archaeology of Prehistoric Hunters and Gatherers. What Uthmeier refers to as 'adverse natural conditions' are climate changes after the end of the last interglacial more than 100,000 years ago. Particularly severe cold phases during...
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People from Tuscany are most similar to Neanderthals
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Abroad in the Yard ^
| February 9, 2012 | AITY
In a series of histograms (graphs showing the distribution of genome and population data), Hawks shows that Asian and European genomes have significantly more Neanderthal DNA than African genomes. The
averages for Asian and European samples are around 3% higher than the average for African samples. Whatever gave Africans some degree of similarity to Neanderthals, non-Africans seem to have received around 3% more of it. Europeans average a bit more Neanderthal DNA than Asians, showing that Europeans probably mixed with Neanderthals as they moved into Europe, adding a secondary mix of Neanderthal DNA into their genome beyond the primary mix...
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Neanderthals diet: 80% meat, 20% vegetables
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ScienceDaily ^
| March 14, 2016 | Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum
Scientists from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment (HEP) in Tübingen have studied the Neanderthals' diet. Based
on the isotope composition in the collagen from the prehistoric humans' bones, they were able to show that, while the Neanderthals' diet consisted primarily of large plant eaters such at mammoths and rhinoceroses, it also included vegetarian food. The associated studies were recently published in the scientific journals Journal of Human Evolution and Quaternary International. The paleo-diet is one of the new trends among nutrition-conscious people -- but what exactly did the meal plan of our extinct ancestors include? "We have...
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Neanderthals boosted our immune system
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Max-Planck-Gesellschaft ^
| January 07, 2016 | SJ/HR
When modern humans met Neanderthals in Europe and the two species began interbreeding many thousands of years ago, the exchange left humans with gene variations that have increased the ability of those who carry them to ward off infection. This
inheritance from Neanderthals may have also left some people more prone to allergies. Researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS in Paris, France, report about the discoveries in two independent studies, adding to evidence for an important role for interspecies relations in human evolution and specifically in the...
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Neanderthals and humans were hooking up way more than anyone thought
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FoxNews.com/Science ^
| Nov 29, 2018 | Charles Q. Choi Live Science Contributor
Way more sex happened between Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans across Europe and Asia than scientists originally thought, a new study finds. Scientists
initially thought that interbreeding among the two groups was more isolated to a particular place and time — specifically, when they encountered each other in western Eurasia shortly after modern humans left Africa. This idea stemmed from the fact that the genomes of modern humans from outside Africa are only about 2 percent Neanderthal, on average. Subsequent research, however, has found that Neanderthal ancestry is 12 to 20 percent higher in modern East Asians compared...
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SCIENTIST CLAIMS HE CAN BRING BACK NEANDERTHALS
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DAILY MAIL UK via Barbwire ^
| DAILY MAIL UK 20 January 2013/UPDATED DAILY MAIL UK 1 February 2016 via Barbwire 22 July 2016 | BY ALLAN HALL FOR MAILONLINE AND FIONA MACRAE FOR THE DAILY MAIL via Barbwire LEE DUIGON
All he needs is “an adventurous female” to be a surrogate mother, says a scientist at Harvard Medical School, and he’s off to the races on a plan to resurrect the extinct Neanderthals. He thinks he has enough Neanderthal DNA that he can “reconstruct” the whole DNA strand. Would
that mean filling the little gaps with, say, frog DNA? It worked in Jurassic Park. 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...
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Climate change killed off Neanderthals, study says
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Fox ^
| Chris Ciaccia |
The evidence is there that Europe experienced stark cold and dry spells, putting a strain on Neanderthals' food supply and ability to survive. Thanks
to a group of researchers looking at stalagmites in Romania, we may have proof this was indeed the case. Dr. Ersek and his team looked at the stalagmites—rocks that gather in caves for long stretches of time —to look at the climate. Stalagmites contain rings, similar to trees, which can give an indication of how extreme weather patterns, occurring over thousands of years, impacted Neanderthals. The study was published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the...
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Humans and Neanderthals: less different than polar and brown bears
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University of Oxford ^
| June 3, 2020 | press release
Ancient humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans were genetically closer than polar bears and brown bears, and so, like the bears, were able to easily produce healthy, fertile hybrids according to a study, led by the University of Oxford's School of Archaeology... The long history of matings between Neanderthals, humans, and Denisovans has only
recently been demonstrated through the analysis of ancient genomes. The ability of mammalian species, including ancient humans, to produce fertile hybrid offspring has been hard to predict, and the relative fertility of the hybrids remains an open question. Some geneticists have even said that Neanderthals and humans were...
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DNA Inherited From Neanderthals May Increase Risk of Covid-19
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https://www.nytimes.com ^
| Updated July 6, 2020 | By Carl Zimmer
A stretch of DNA linked to Covid-19 was passed down from Neanderthals 60,000 years ago, according to a new study. Scientists
don’t yet know why this particular segment increases the risk of severe illness from the coronavirus. But the new findings, which were posted online on Friday and have not yet been published in a scientific journal, show how some clues to modern health stem from ancient history. “This interbreeding effect that happened 60,000 years ago is still having an impact today,” said Joshua Akey, a geneticist at Princeton University who was not involved in the new study. This piece...
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Neanderthals And Humans Were at War For Over 100,000 Years, Evidence Shows
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(Fake) ScienceAlert ^
| November 3, 2020 | Nicholas R. Longrich, The Conversation
Around 600,000 years ago, humanity split in two. One
group stayed in Africa, evolving into us. The other struck out overland, into Asia, then Europe, becoming Homo neanderthalensis - the Neanderthals. They weren't our ancestors, but a sister species, evolving in parallel.
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Neanderthals of Western Mediterranean did not become extinct because of changes in climate
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EurekAlert! ^
| July 20, 2020 | Universita di Bologna
Homo Neanderthaliensis did not become extinct because of changes in climate. At
least, this did not happen to the several Neanderthals groups that lived in the western Mediterranean 42,000 years ago. A research group of the University of Bologna came to this conclusion after a detailed paleoclimatic reconstruction of the last ice age through the analysis of stalagmites sampled from some caves in Apulia, Italy. The researchers focused on the Murge karst plateau in Apulia, where Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens coexisted for at least 3,000 years, from approximately 45,000 to 42,000 years ago... Data extracted from the stalagmites showed that...
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Scientists Sequence Y Chromosome DNA of Denisovans and Neanderthals
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sci-news ^
| 09/25/2020
A growing number of ancient DNA studies on Neanderthals, Denisovans and Homo sapiens suggest intertwined evolutionary and population histories, including several admixture events between early modern and archaic humans. However,
ancient nuclear and mtDNA sequences revealed phylogenetic discrepancies between the three groups that are hard to explain. For example, autosomal genomes show that Neanderthals and Denisovans are sister groups that split from modern humans more than 550,000 years ago. However, all but the earliest Neanderthal mtDNA samples are far more similar to those of modern humans than to those from Denisovans. These studies suggest that Neanderthals originally carried a Denisovan-like...
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Warm weather pushed Neanderthals into cannibalism
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Cosmos Magazine ^
| March 29, 2019 | Dyani Lewis
In the 1990s, the remains of six Neanderthals -- two adults, two adolescents and two children -- were found in a small cave at Baume Moula-Guercy in the Rhône valley in southern France. The bones bear many of the hallmarks of cannibalism: cut marks made by stone tools, complete dismemberment of the
individuals, and finger bones that look as if they've been gnawed by Neanderthal teeth, rather than by other carnivores. Remains from other sites in Croatia, Spain and Belgium also show evidence of cannibalism. But in each case, there has been a lack of evidence to answer the question...
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Neanderthals walked upright just like the humans of today
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EurekAlert! ^
| Monday, February 25, 2019 | University of Zurich
Neanderthals are often depicted as having straight spines and poor posture. However,
these prehistoric humans were more similar to us than many assume. University of Zurich researchers have shown that Neanderthals walked upright just like modern humans - thanks to a virtual reconstruction of the pelvis and spine of a very well-preserved Neanderthal skeleton found in France... Since the 1950s, scientists have known that the image of the Neanderthal as a hunched over caveman is not an accurate one. Their similarities to ourselves - both in evolutionary and behavioral terms - have also long been known, but in recent years...
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