Are you part Neanderthal?

People of European descent may be 5% Neanderthal, according to a DNA study that counters the view that modern humans left Africa and replaced all other existing hominids. The same study, published in the latest issue of the journal PloS Genetics, also says West Africans could be related to an archaic human population... "Instead of a population that left Africa 100,000 years ago and replaced all other archaic human groups, we propose that this population interacted with another population that had been in Europe for much longer, maybe 400,000 years," says Vincent Plagnol... Using statistics and computer modelling, the researchers focused on linkage 'disequilibriums', or sections within genes that did not make sense if only modern human matings are considered... The scientists are not certain which early human group could have contributed to West African DNA, but both Europeans and Africans in the study showed about the same 5% archaic contribution. Neanderthals are believed to have originated in Africa around 400,000 years ago, but they left and then settled in Europe, hence the apparent lack of interaction with modern humans in Africa. Alan Templeton, professor of Evolutionary and Population Programs at the University of Michigan, has also conducted DNA studies and comes to similar conclusions... New technologies are being developed to sequence nuclear DNA from fossils, so in the near future, scientists may learn more about how modern human genes compare with those of archaic humans, like Neanderthals.

Early Hominids in Siberia?

Volume 50 Number 3, May/June 1997
by Andrew L. Slayman

The site of Diring Yuriakh in central Siberia has been dated to ca. 300,000 years ago, suggesting that hominids may have settled the area 270,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a report in Science. A team led by Michael R. Waters of Texas A&M University used thermoluminescence dating to estimate the ages of layers above and below one containing stone flakes and a few rocks resembling simple tools known as unifacial choppers. These dates provided a range of 260,000 to 370,000 years for the deposition of the stones. Many experts in chronometric dating methods find the work solid, though Jack Rink of McMaster University in Ontario was cited in Science as saying that he would like to see them verified by another method.

Debate about the site centers on whether the proposed artifacts are in fact manmade. Though Waters and his team say they are, and present a variety of arguments to support their case, not all scholars are convinced. Paleoanthropologist Richard Klein of Stanford University, who has seen some of the pieces, says they may instead have been shaped by natural processes such as river flow or frost heaving that can occasionally flake stones. The issue depends in part on the number of nonartifactual rocks from which the flaked pieces were selected. Though such a number is not available, it must be large since the original excavation covered 1.5 square miles. Microscopic examination of the stones' surfaces could in theory determine whether they were tools by looking for tiny scars left by the materials they were used to cut, but Klein doubts this would work in practice because the surfaces are very abraded and few use traces are likely to have survived.

Diring Yuriakh was discovered in 1982 by Russian archaeologist Yuri Mochanov, who has argued that it is 1.8 to 3.2 million years old.

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