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"Given that the sand sealing the chamber was [40,000] years old, and that the chamber was therefore older, it must have been Neanderthals," who lived in Eurasia from about 200,000 to 40,000 years ago and were likely using the cave, Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar National Museum, told Live Science in an email.While Finlayson's team was studying the cave last month, they discovered the hollow area. After climbing through it, they found it is 43 feet (13 meters) in length, with stalactites hanging like eerie icicles from the chamber ceiling.Along the surface of the cave chamber, the researchers found...

Neanderthals living in the Swabian Jura more than 45,000 years ago used sophisticated techniques with many different production strategies to make stone tools. The Heidenschmiede site has yielded many stone tools and by-products of the toolmaking process.The researchers refitted the pieces made from stone cores and were thereby able to show the techniques – requiring planning and forethought – used in the process...The Heidenschmiede, a rock shelter near Heidenheim in southern Germany, was discovered and excavated in 1928 by amateur archaeologist Hermann Mohn, who recognized it as an important site for stone and bone worked by early humans...The bone and...

As far as Lower Paleolithic archaeology goes, this is quite the haul: Experts have uncovered a record 98 elephant-bone tools at a site dating back some 400,000 years. This discovery could change our thinking on how some of the early humans – such as Neanderthals – fashioned implements like these. The bones were collected from a place called Castel di Guido, close to modern-day Rome. In the dim and distant past, it was a popular watering hole for the now-extinct straight-tusked elephant (Palaeoloxodon antiquus), and it looks as though a substantial number of the animals died there too. This newly...

The mysterious Denisovans were only formally identified about a decade ago, when a single finger bone unearthed from a cave in Siberia clued scientists in to the ancient existence of a kind of archaic hominin we'd never before seen.But that's only one side of the story. The truth is, modern humans had in fact already encountered Denisovans a long time before this. We crossed paths with them an eternity ago.So far back, in fact, that we forgot about them entirely. Especially as they – and other archaic humans, such as the Neanderthals – faded into the unliving past, and Homo...

Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday.The issue had roiled the paleoarchaeology community ever since the publication of a 2018 paper attributing red ocher pigment found on the stalagmitic dome of Cueva de Ardales to our extinct "cousin" species.The dating suggested the art was at least 64,800 years old, made at a time when modern humans did not inhabit the continent...A new analysis revealed the composition and placement of the pigments were not consistent with natural processes—instead, the...

In a new study, scientists from the CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, and the French Blood Establishment (EFS) have examined the previously sequenced genomes of one Denisovan and three Neandertal females who lived 100,000 to 40,000 years ago, in order to identify their blood groups and consider what they may reveal about human’s evolutionary history. Of the 40-some known blood group systems, the team concentrated on the seven usually considered for blood transfusion purposes, the most common of which are the ABO (determining the A, B, AB, and O blood types) and Rh systems.The findings bolster previous hypotheses but also offer new...

This Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2003 file photo shows a reconstructed Neanderthal skeleton, right, and a modern human skeleton on display at the Museum of Natural History in New York.What makes humans unique? Scientists have taken another step toward solving an enduring mystery with a new tool that may allow for more precise comparisons between the DNA of modern humans and that of our extinct ancestors. Just 7% of our genome is uniquely shared with other humans, and not shared by other early ancestors, according to a study published Friday in the journal Science Advances. "That's a pretty small percentage," said...

The remains of nine Neanderthals have been unearthed in the Guattari Cave near the seaside town of San Felice Circeo, 70 miles south of Rome. The cave’s entrance, blocked off by a rockslide that stopped human occupation of the site tens of thousands of years ago , was discovered by accident on February 24th, 1939. Inside were animal bones, the remains of hyena repasts, and in the last chamber the well-preserved cranium of a Neanderthal. The chamber would henceforth be dubbed the Antrum of Man. Even with a large hole in the temple, it was one the best-preserved Neanderthal skulls...

While there is substantial evidence for art and symbolic behaviour in early Homo sapiens across Africa and Eurasia, similar evidence connected to Neanderthals is sparse and often contested in scientific debates. Each new discovery is thus crucial for our understanding of Neanderthals’ cognitive capacity. Here we report on the discovery of an at least 51,000-year-old engraved giant deer phalanx found at the former cave entrance of Einhornhöhle, northern Germany. The find comes from an apparent Middle Palaeolithic context that is linked to Neanderthals. The engraved bone demonstrates that conceptual imagination, as a prerequisite to compose individual lines into a coherent...

The fossil may represent a new Homo species that lived more than 146,000 years ago =================================================================================== A fossil skull nicknamed “Dragon Man” has surfaced in China under mysterious circumstances, with big news for Neandertals. Dragon Man belonged to a previously unrecognized Stone Age species that replaces Neandertals as the closest known relatives of people today, researchers say. A nearly complete male skull now housed in the Geoscience Museum of Hebei GEO University in Shijiazhuang, China, represents a species dubbed Homo longi by Hebei GEO paleoanthropologist Xijun Ni and his colleagues. The scientists describe the skull, which dates to at least...

Scientists said on Thursday (June 24) they had discovered a new kind of early human after studying pieces of fossilised bone dug up at a site used by a cement plant in central Israel. The fragments of a skull and a lower jaw with teeth were about 130,000 years old and could force a rethinkof parts of the human family tree, the researchers from Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem said. Nesher Ramla Homo - named after the place southeast of Tel Aviv where it was found - may have lived alongside our species, Homo sapiens, for...

The Nesher Ramla bones. (Avi Levin and Ilan Theiler, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University) ================================================================================== More than 120,000 years ago in the Levant, Homo sapiens lived side-by-side with a type of ancient human we didn't know about - until now. That's according to new fossil evidence of this human uncovered by archaeologists - fragments of ancient skull and jaw bones, and teeth, which seem to fit both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens, but also... neither. This newly discovered hominin type could be the ancestor to Neanderthal populations in Europe, answering the mystery of how these populations were infiltrated with...

Italian archaeologists have uncovered the fossilized remains of nine Neanderthals in a cave near Rome, shedding new light on how the Italian peninsula was populated and under what environmental conditions. The Italian Culture Ministry announced the discovery Saturday, saying it confirmed that the Guattari Cave in San Felice Circeo was "one of the most significant places in the world for the history of Neanderthals." A Neanderthal skull was discovered in the cave in 1939.The fossilized bones include skulls, skull fragments, two teeth and other bone fragments. The oldest remains date from between 100,000 and 90,000 years ago, while the other...

Archaeologists in Italy have discovered the remains of nine Neanderthals who may have been hunted by hyenas, in a prehistoric cave south-east of Rome. The fossilized bones, which include skull fragments and broken jawbones, were found in the Guattari Cave in the coastal town San Felice Circeo.... ...Mario Rolfo, a professor of archaeology at Tor Vergata University, said most of the Neanderthals had been killed by hyenas and dragged back to their cave den as food. "Neanderthals were prey for these animals," the Guardian quoted him as saying. "Hyenas hunted them, especially the most vulnerable, like sick or elderly individuals."...

To extract ancient human chromosomal DNA from caves, Vernot and colleagues identified regions in chromosomes rich in mutations specific to hominids to help the team filter out nonhuman DNA. This helped the researchers successfully analyze Neandertal chromosomal DNA from more than 150 samples of sediment roughly 50,000 to 200,000 years old from a cave in Spain and two caves in Siberia.After the team compared its data with DNA previously collected from Neandertal fossils of about the same age, the findings suggested that all these Neandertals were split into two genetically distinct waves that both dispersed across Eurasia. One emerged about...

Neanderthals lived in parts of the Middle East and Europe from 400,000 to 40,000 years ago. During that time, they left behind a lot of evidence of their existence—primarily their bones and crafted objects such as stone tools. Sometimes, though, they also left behind evidence of their activities, such as walking along a beach next to a body of water. In this new effort, the researchers have found evidence of as many as 36 individuals walking along a beach—including children.The work involved studying footprints left on Matalascañas beach, in Doñana National Park, in Spain. Prior work there had involved footprints...

Ancient DNA from Neandertals and early modern humans has recently shown that the groups likely interbred somewhere in the Near East after modern humans left Africa some 50,000 years ago. As a result, all people outside Africa carry around 2% to 3% Neandertal DNA. In modern human genomes, those Neandertal DNA segments became increasingly shorter over time and their length can be used to estimate when an individual lived. Archaeological data published last year furthermore suggests that modern humans were already present in southeastern Europe 47-43,000 years ago, but due to a scarcity of fairly complete human fossils and the...

In a seemingly paradoxical study, US researchers found that redheads have a preternaturally high pain tolerance — wait for it — due to a mechanism that ups their susceptibility to sunburns. “These findings describe the mechanistic basis behind earlier evidence suggesting varied pain thresholds in different pigmentation backgrounds,” said Dr. David Fisher of the Massachusetts General Hospital in Massachusetts. He led the fiery study published in the journal Science Advances. The research found that the cells that determine skin color — called melanocytes — play a large role in deciding how people experience pain.

An Acheulean handaxe. (Didier Descouens/CC BY-SA 4.0) ================================================================== Figuring out when the earliest human species first developed and used stone tools is an important task for anthropologists, since it was such an important evolutionary step. Remarkably, the projected date of early stone technology just got pushed back by tens of thousands of years. Using a recently introduced type of statistical analysis, researchers estimated the proportion of stone tool artifacts that might be lying undiscovered based on what has been dug up so far. In turn, this gives us clues about how old the tool remnants we don't yet know about...

Dr Hugo Zeberg, assistant professor in the department of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, talks to Jason Goodyer about his research into Neanderthal genes and the impact they could have on COVID-19 patients. How much of the human genome has been inherited from Neanderthals?If you have roots from outside of Africa, then roughly 2 per cent of your DNA is Neanderthal. But if we put all these pieces together, we find more than half of the Neanderthal genome in modern humans. But it will differ between people: some carry some pieces, some carry other pieces. How do...