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Europeans never had Neanderthal neighbors. Russian find suggests Neanderthals died out earlier.
Nature News ^ | 05/11/2011 | Ewen Callaway

Posted on 05/11/2011 7:41:02 PM PDT by SeekAndFind

The first humans to reach Europe may have found it a ghost world. Carbon-dated Neanderthal remains from the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains suggest that the archaic species had died out before modern humans arrived.

The remains are almost 10,000 years older than expected. They come from just one cave in western Russia, called Mezmaiskaya, but bones at other Neanderthal sites farther west could also turn out to be more ancient than previously thought, thanks to a precise carbon-dating technique, says Thomas Higham, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Oxford, UK, and a co-author of a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.

The implication, says Higham's team, is that Neanderthals and humans might never have met in Europe. However, the Neanderthal genome, decoded last year2, hints that the ancestors of all humans, except those from Africa, interbred with Neanderthals somewhere. Perhaps humans departing Africa encountered resident Neanderthals in the Middle East.

"DNA results show that there was admixture probably at some stage in our human ancestry, but it more than likely happened quite a long time before humans arrived in Europe," says Ron Pinhasi, an archaeologist at University College Cork in Ireland, who is lead author of the latest study. "I don't believe there were regions where Neanderthals were living next to modern humans. I just don't find it very feasible," he adds.

Time horizon

Carbon dating of stone tools characteristic to humans and Neanderthals, as well as their physical remains, has previously given the impression that the first humans to reach Europe, between about 40,000 and 30,000 years ago, shared the continent with Neanderthals long established there.

(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...


TOPICS: History; Science; Society
KEYWORDS: europeans; evolution; godsgravesglyphs; neandertal; neandertals; neanderthal; neanderthals
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1 posted on 05/11/2011 7:41:09 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

A blow to evolution?


2 posted on 05/11/2011 7:46:19 PM PDT by wastedyears (SEAL SIX makes me proud to have been playing SOCOM since 2003.)
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To: SunkenCiv

Most interesting.


3 posted on 05/11/2011 7:46:30 PM PDT by Ciexyz
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To: SeekAndFind; SunkenCiv

The problem here would be why did the Neanderthals die out, without competition or aggression, from Homo Sapiens?


4 posted on 05/11/2011 7:49:08 PM PDT by Lucius Cornelius Sulla (Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable -- Daniel Webster)
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To: wastedyears

‘A blow to evolution?’

No.


5 posted on 05/11/2011 7:50:27 PM PDT by Lucius Cornelius Sulla (Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable -- Daniel Webster)
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To: SeekAndFind
The liberals will not like the idea that humans and Neanderthals did not have sex.
6 posted on 05/11/2011 7:51:23 PM PDT by mountainlion (America land of the free because of the Brave.)
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To: SeekAndFind
Esau
7 posted on 05/11/2011 7:53:46 PM PDT by Palter (If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it. ~ Mark Twain)
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To: SeekAndFind
'Reich's team did not find any proof that Neanderthals ever mated with the ancestors of modern Europeans specifically. Yet Reich says that new, more sensitive methods for detecting interbreeding, as well as genome sequences from late Neanderthals could change that conclusion. "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence," he says.'

The key sentence "Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence,"

8 posted on 05/11/2011 7:55:23 PM PDT by Lucius Cornelius Sulla (Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable -- Daniel Webster)
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To: SeekAndFind

Interesting, but I have my doubts that they didn’t co-exist.


9 posted on 05/11/2011 7:55:54 PM PDT by Inyo-Mono (My greatest fear is that when I'm gone my wife will sell my guns for what I told her I paid for them)
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To: Lucius Cornelius Sulla
" The problem here would be why did the Neanderthals die out, without competition or aggression, from Homo Sapiens?"

Driven by concerns over rapidly dwindling ice sheets, Neanderthals set out to decrease Neanderthalgenic Global Warming by no longer using fire. The rest is history.

10 posted on 05/11/2011 7:56:54 PM PDT by Flag_This (Real presidents don't bow.)
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To: wastedyears

RE: A blow to evolution?

Not really a blow to evolution, just another change of historical guesses to “fit” the current evidence. Originally the theory was Homo sapiens lived side by side with Neanderthals and interbred with them and later, maybe even displaced or killed them.

Now this latest find suggests that humans didn’t kill the Neanderthals; they died before we got there.

I guess the pertinent question is -— “Do we honestly think we understand the Human-Neanderthal relationship better than we did twenty-five years ago? If so, in what ways?”


11 posted on 05/11/2011 7:58:30 PM PDT by SeekAndFind (u)
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To: mountainlion

‘The liberals will not like the idea that humans and Neanderthals did not have sex.’

The article clearly states that ALL humans not residing in Africa are partially descended from Neanderthals. That means both me and you and most Freepers.


12 posted on 05/11/2011 7:58:49 PM PDT by Lucius Cornelius Sulla (Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable -- Daniel Webster)
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To: SeekAndFind

So, if humans came “up out of Africa”, and the Neanderthals were already in Europe, then where the hell did the Neanderthals come from?


13 posted on 05/11/2011 7:59:41 PM PDT by Concho (-)
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To: Flag_This

By George, you’ve got it!


14 posted on 05/11/2011 8:00:52 PM PDT by Lucius Cornelius Sulla (Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable -- Daniel Webster)
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To: Concho

‘where the hell did the Neanderthals come from?’

The current theory seems to be that they descended from Heidelberg Man, which arose in Africa more than half a million years before Homo Sapiens, and who had spread out of Africa at, very roughly, 500 thousand B.C.


15 posted on 05/11/2011 8:06:00 PM PDT by Lucius Cornelius Sulla (Liberty and Union, Now and Forever, One and Inseparable -- Daniel Webster)
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To: Lucius Cornelius Sulla

I guess it was inevitable that a guy named Heidelberg would end up in Europe.


16 posted on 05/11/2011 8:12:35 PM PDT by married21 (As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.)
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To: Lucius Cornelius Sulla

So they were a distinctly separate group and migration way previous to “humans”. Wow, we are getting down to counting pretty fine threads. I was always led to believe that they wre just an earlier form of modern man~~ Neanderthals, Cro-Magnon and modern man....


17 posted on 05/11/2011 8:13:20 PM PDT by Concho (-)
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To: Flag_This

Good one! Clever.


18 posted on 05/11/2011 8:22:02 PM PDT by Bernard Marx
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To: Concho; SeekAndFind; wastedyears; Ciexyz; Lucius Cornelius Sulla; mountainlion; Palter; ...
The Basic Non Evolution of Modern Man

Crap about humans being related to any hominids other than via similar design remains crap no matter how often it is repeated. Neanderthal DNA was halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee; we could no more interbreed with them than we could with horses, and we are not descended from them, and all other hominids were FURTHER removed from us THAN the Neanderthal.

Too-far-removed-to-be-descended-from-via-evolution is a transitive relationship. There is nothing on this planet we could be descended from via any process resembling evolution.

19 posted on 05/11/2011 8:25:19 PM PDT by wendy1946
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To: SeekAndFind
Perhaps humans departing Africa encountered resident Neanderthals in the Middle East.

This is a joke, right?

20 posted on 05/11/2011 8:28:45 PM PDT by April Lexington (Study the Constitution so you know what they are taking away!)
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