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People today of Native American, European, Asian, and North African heritage have Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, with percentages estimated between 1-4 percent. As a result, the majority of people alive today are related to these humans that, as a distinct population, are thought to have gone extinct 39,000-41,000 years ago. An international team of researchers led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has just overcome the problem, allowing for whole genome sequencing of five Neanderthals who lived 39,000-47,000 years ago. The findings, reported in the journal Nature, provide important insights into Neanderthal history before and...

They have an unwarranted image as brutish and uncaring, but new research has revealed just how knowledgeable and effective Neanderthal healthcare was. The study, by the University of York, reveals that Neanderthal healthcare was uncalculated and highly effective -- challenging our notions that they were brutish compared to modern humans. The researchers argue that the care provided was widespread and should be seen as a "compassionate and knowledgeable response to injury and illness." It is well known that Neanderthals sometimes provided care for the injured, but new analysis by the team at York suggest they were genuinely caring of their...

A new study led by the University of Southampton and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology shows that paintings in three caves in Spain were created more than 64,000 years ago - 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe. This means that the Palaeolithic (Ice Age) cave art - including pictures of animals, dots and geometric signs - must have been made by Neanderthals, a 'sister' species to Homo sapiens, and Europe's sole human inhabitants at the time. It also indicates that they thought symbolically, like modern humans. Published today in the journal Science, the study reveals how...

A study suggests that early Neanderthals in southern Tuscany may have used fire to manufacture wooden tools used for foraging. In 2012, excavations for constructing thermal baths at Poggetti Vecchi, nestled at the foot of a hill in Grosseto in southern Tuscany, turned up a trove of wooden implements and fossil bones of the straight-tusked elephant Palaeoloxodon antiquus. The site was radiometrically dated to the late Middle Pleistocene, around 171,000 years ago, when early Neanderthals inhabited the region. Biancamaria Aranguren and colleagues report that most of the wooden implements were hewn from boxwood branches and likely used as digging sticks....

Archaeologists in Israel have discovered the oldest fossil of a modern human outside Africa. The fossil suggests that humans first migrated out of the continent much earlier than previously believed. The scientists were digging in a cave called Misliya, on the slopes of Mount Carmel on the northern coast of Israel. "The cave is one of a series of prehistoric caves," says Mina Weinstein-Evron of the Zinman Institute of Archaeology at the University of Haifa, who led the team. "It's a collapsed cave, but people lived there before it collapsed." The cave had been occupied for several hundred thousand years,...

The left hemi-maxilla with teeth. Credit: Rolf Quam _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ A large international research team, led by Israel Hershkovitz from Tel Aviv University and including Rolf Quam from Binghamton University, State University of New York, has discovered the earliest modern human fossil ever found outside of Africa. The finding suggests that modern humans left the continent at least 50,000 years earlier than previously thought. "Misliya is an exciting discovery," says Rolf Quam, Binghamton University anthropology professor and a coauthor of the study. "It provides the clearest evidence yet that our ancestors first migrated out of Africa much earlier than we...

In a review published in the journal Trends in Genetics on January 25, scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing discuss what we know about the genetics of ancient individuals from Eurasia (Europe and Western Asia) between 45,000-7,500 years ago. The authors summarized work that investigated the genomes of more than 20 ancients in the Eurasian family tree, including the 45,000-year-old Ust'-Ishim individual from Central Siberia... ..."But with the information from the several individuals available for ancient DNA sequencing we do have hints at interesting population structure, migration and interaction in East Asia." The researchers learned that in...

The discovery of a set of 9.7-million-year-old teeth has led archaeologists to raise questions about the commonly believed 'out-of-Africa' theory of human origins. The teeth, which were discovered in a former bed of the Rhine river, don't resemble those of any other human species found in Europe or Asia. The find suggests that contrary to popular belief, Europe may be the cradle of humanity.

Neanderthal Racism Continues October 11, 2017 | David F. Coppedge The evidence shows that Neanderthals were fully human, having shared genetic information with us. Why, then, do Darwin Supremacists continue to treat them as “other” than human? One clear case (among many) where paleoanthropologists have been totally wrong has been in the classification of Neanderthals as a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis. As pointed out before, this amounts to a case of historical racism. For years, there have been growing signs that these ancient humans were just as intelligent as modern humans. The clincher in the last few years, though, is...

Major Evolutionary Blunders: Neanderthals Were Subhuman in Imagination Only by Randy J. Guliuzza, P.E., M.D. * Evidence for Creation “So easy, a caveman could do it” is the witty slogan of a company hoping to lure customers to switch car insurance. The humorous catch to the commercial was the brutish-looking, yet endearing, Neanderthals living among us who found the slogan stereotyping them as dimwits to be “not cool” or “hurtful.” The fact that viewers could readily spot the standard view of Neanderthals shows how pervasive it is and how it dominates the popular perception.

Here's What Happened When Neanderthals And Ancient Humans Hooked Up 80,000 Years Ago Dina Spector Jan. 29, 2014, 1:49 PM     Neanderthal REUTERS/Nikola Solic Hyperrealistic face of a neanderthal male is displayed in a cave in the new Neanderthal Museum in the northern Croatian town of Krapina February 25, 2010 By comparing the Neanderthal genome to modern human DNA, the authors of two new studies, both published on Wednesday, show how DNA that humans have inherited from breeding with Neanderthals has shaped us. Modern humans, Neanderthals, and their sister lineage, Denisovans, descended from a common ancestor. The...

The remains that were found were radiocarbon-dated to be about 40,500 to 45,500 years old, and it was determined that Neanderthals butchered and used the bones of their peers as tools, according to a press release from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports. The team identified 99 "uncertain" bone fragments as belonging to Neanderthals, which would make this the greatest trove of Neanderthal remains ever found north of the Alps. The findings also shed light on the genetics of this lost human species, adding to previously collected data on Neanderthal genes....

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,”...

WASHINGTON – First Lady Michelle Obama told Oprah Winfrey that she and Barack are “regular folks” who don’t want to "waste our talents just making money for ourselves.”She said President Obama “hasn’t changed” because he is “an authentic man” who is going to leave the White House as the same person.“So I want to know, what are those days when you just say, mmm, mmm, mmm — look at me in the White House,” Winfrey asked Obama at the White House’s United State of Women Summit in Washington.“There are so — yeah, just sitting up here, mmm, mmm, mmm. There...

WASHINGTON – First Lady Michelle Obama told Oprah Winfrey that she and Barack are “regular folks” who don’t want to "waste our talents just making money for ourselves.” She said President Obama “hasn’t changed” because he is “an authentic man” who is going to leave the White House as the same person. (snip) Winfrey replied, “He’s got the swag. Did he always have that swag or has he gotten swaggier?” “No, he was very swagalicious. Look, I told people this from the very start, when I started running Barack Obama is exactly who he says he is. We both are....

Mysterious structures found deep inside a French cave are the work of Neanderthal builders who lived in the region more than 100,000 years before modern humans set foot in Europe. The extraordinary constructions are made from nearly 400 stalagmites that have been yanked from the ground and stacked on top of one another to produce rudimentary walls on the damp cave floor. The most prominent formations are two ringed walls, built four layers deep in places, which appear to have been propped up with stalagmites wedged in place as vertical stays. The largest of the walls is nearly seven metres...

This image released by the Diputacion Floral de Bizkaia on Friday May 27, 2016, shows a cave drawing. Spanish archaeologists say they have discovered an exceptional set of Paleolithic-era cave drawings that could rank among the best in a country that already boasts some of the world's most important cave art. Chief site archaeologist Diego Garate said Friday that an estimated 70 drawings were found on ledges 300 meters (1,000 feet) underground in the Atxurra cave, Berriatua, in the northern Basque region. He described the site as being in "the Champions' League" of cave art, among the top 10 sites...

Deep in a dark cave in southwestern France lie half a dozen mysterious structures that scientists believe were built by Neanderthals 176,000 years ago -- about 140,000 years before the first modern humans arrived in Europe. The structures, described Wednesday in the journal Nature, are located in what is known as the Bruniquel Cave. They are made of roughly 400 pieces of stalagmites, all roughly, almost eerily, the same size. Archaeologists say these mineral formations were probably broken off the cave floor by ancient hands and then deliberately arranged into two large rings and a series of four round piles...

Prehistoric cave occupants paid attention to cave wall morphology and touch when creating hand stencils. Human occupants of two caves in Northern Spain put some thought into where they placed their hand stencils on cave walls as much as 37,000 years ago, during Palaeolithic times. The topography and physical characteristics of the walls in the low light conditions of the caves seem to have mattered to them, suggest a team of researchers... What they found was a pattern that indicated selection or attention to certain types of natural cave wall features for placement of the stencils. "In total 80% of...

...In recent years, dental calculus has emerged as an unexpected, but valuable, long-term reservoir of ancient DNA from dietary and microbial sources... Very little dental calculus was required for analysis--fewer than 25 milligrams per individual. This makes it possible to obtain high quality genetic ancestry information from very little starting material, an important consideration for archaeological remains... Although dental calculus preserves alongside skeletal remains, it is not actually a human tissue. Dental calculus, also known as tartar, is a calcified form of dental plaque that acquires human DNA and proteins passively, primarily through the saliva and other host secretions. Once...