BBC: How Did the Last Neanderthals Live

The BBC has a post on some archaeological discoveries that have illuminated how the Neandertals lived.  Melissa Hogenboom writes:

For the most part, Neanderthals were a resilient group. They existed for about 200,000 years longer than we modern humans (Homo sapiens) have been alive. Evidence of their existence vanishes around 28,000 years ago – giving us an estimate for when they may, finally, have died off.

Fossil evidence shows that, towards the end, the final few were clinging onto survival in places like Gibraltar. Findings from this British overseas territory, located at the southern tip of the Iberian peninsula, are helping us to understand more about what these last living Neanderthals were really like. And new insights reveal that they were much more like us than we once believed.

It always seems to strike these writers as odd that Neandertals were capable of culture roughly equivalent to our own.  The last group of Neandertals lived at a time that was much harsher, climate-wise, than today, with the tundra line being equivalent in latitude, to Vienna.

The original Gibraltar skull was discovered in 1848 (eight years before the type specimen was discovered in the Neander Valley, in Germany).  Clive Finlayson, the Director of the Gibraltar Museum has been part of a team that has been excavating the set of caves there and four caves have been identified.

“It was in some way Neanderthal city,” he says. “This was the place with the highest concentration of Neanderthals anywhere in Europe.” It’s not known if this might amount to only dozens of people, or a few families, since genetic evidence also suggests that Neanderthals lived in “many small subpopulations.”

There is still considerable mystery surrounding just why the Neandertals faded out. The best theory going at the moment is gene swamping. Given that the Neandertal and early modern human genomes were both probably pretty stable, Neandertal/modern human mating could very well have resulted in hybrid depression. Eventually, the Neandertal genes, facing negative selection, dropped out of the genome.

Denisovans More Closely Related to Modern Humans than Neandertals

Science Daily has a post relating recent research on the genetic studies involving the Denisovan material from Siberia.  The research, done by CNRS in France has this to report:

Now a team of scientists from the Institut Jacques Monod (CNRS / Université de Paris) has measured and photographed another fragment found in Denisova Cave. Genomic analysis reveals it is the missing piece of the same phalanx whose proximal fragment enabled initial sequencing of the Denisovan genome.

Together with colleagues from the PACEA laboratory (CNRS / University of Bordeaux / French Ministry of Culture) and the University of Toronto (Canada), the scientists compared the new fragment to the phalanges of Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans. Their analysis indicates it is very close to the latter, and less like the former..

This research suggests that there was considerable population mixing and genetic variability in this population, given the news that came out last year detailing the finding of a child skeleton that was, as nearly as the researchers could tell, the offspring of a Neandertal and a modern human.This just continues to solidify the idea that these groups interbred routinely throughout the late Pleistocene. 

The Ancient History of Neanderthals in Europe

The Max Planck Society has a post in PhysOrg, a highly-regarded science site, on the history of Neandertals (they have used the old spelling). 

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, have retrieved nuclear genome sequences from the femur of a male Neanderthal discovered in 1937 in Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave, Germany, and from the maxillary bone of a Neanderthal girl found in 1993 in Scladina Cave, Belgium. Both Neanderthals lived around 120,000 years ago, and therefore predate most of the Neanderthals whose genomes have been sequenced to date.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the research was how much evolution within Neandertals was revealed:

Intriguingly, unlike the nuclear genome, the mitochondrial genome of the Neanderthal from Hohlenstein-Stadel Cave in Germany is quite different from that of later Neanderthals—a previous report showed that more than 70 mutations distinguish it from the mitochondrial genomes of other Neanderthals. The researchers suggest that early European Neanderthals may have inherited DNA from a yet undescribed population.

As with what is going on in human fossil research in China, it seems as though there is a tangled web of relationships between human populations extending through both time and space.  Whatever complexity we envision for these groups, it is probably far more so.  As I wrote about the Chinese material:

The implications of these skulls are stark: there has been widespread population mixing and regional continuity in Europe and Asia for at least 400 thousand years. Not only did the Neandertals feel enough cultural kinship to mate and have children with these East Asian people, the early modern humans coming out of Africa did, as well.  As Chris Davis of China Daily News put it: “One big happy family.”

It is becoming increasingly clear that our simplistic notions of population replacement and regional continuity are probably wrong. Is evolution occurring in these human groups? It absolutely is. Just how these puzzle pieces relate to each other is the question.