That Neanderthal question.

I'm not so sure. The separation between what were going to become moderns and Neandertals kicked off around 600,000 years ago and we had diverged by 300,000 years ago. So how come African folks didn't hang onto these commonalities? In order for north Africans that led to us hanging onto them then they were getting jiggy with European/Levantine peoples throughout that time so that still shows hybridisation. I don't buy that one either. Evidence in the stones and bones shows us and them hanging out for 10,000 years in the Levant, in the same areas, cheek to jowl in neighbouring caves and that's when the genetic clocks seem to suggest we got all romantic. That makes more sense than this theory. To my mind anyway.

Yea, but I'm not quite sure I buy that. It would also suggest quite a different and isolated group of south African humans that had pretty much no genetic contact with north eastern humans for 100,000's of 1000's of years an kinda evolved modernity all on their ownsome. That what became non African humans(outside of the northern lads) never went south within their own continent yet happily traipsed as far as Australia pretty quickly.

Aside... on that score I wonder do the various "negritos" scattered along the islands of south Asia like the Andamans have Neandertal DNA? They have very old African DNA and actually look exactly like shorter than average sub Saharan Africans. If they don't and I suspect they don't, then that's interesting in that it shows many separate modern human migrations from Africa, or my personal take that some ran along the coast avoiding previous people in the interior, while others went inland. Folks like the Andamans are isolated relicts of the former travelers. We can forget that when we left Africa it wasn't into virgin territory(except for Australia and some islands. Hell Flores "hobbits" got to an island in the middle of nowhere). There were people living in these lands for over a million years. We don't know how aggressive they or we were, how territorial etc. We likely applied caution in our earliest movements, which were probably small scale groups at first. Us bumping into a tribe of Denisovans may have gone either way.

Hey maybe north eastern humans didn't go into southern Africa. In historical times it seems they didn't range much beyond the shores of the nile. It does seem odd if it is the case as it would make Southern Africans even with their biggest genetic diversity isolates as a group for at least 200,000 years. Maybe they didn't have the "wanderlust gene" to nearly the same degree as their northeastern cousins, hence the huge diversity? Possibly. Funny enough they didn't attempt to colonise Zanzibar or Madagascar which they could see on a clear day so maybe? Ah no hang on, naw I'm talking arse here, no I still don't buy this paper at all.

Of course we still have proof of interbreeding with archaic humans. The Denisovans in Asia are a given. Then we have the curious findings that the Neandertal genes found in Asians are different to those found in Europeans. This latter thang kinda seals the deal for me that we did indeed interbreed. On top of that I'll make a prediction. They're currently sequencing Otzi the iceman lads DNA and I'll put money down he's got more Neandertal DNA than average. Basically cos he was closer in time to the jiggy jiggy. I'll place that betting chip on any other older neolithic DNA that comes up too.


EDIT Actually I've just thought of a Game Over for this paper. The ancient human bottleneck that occurred around 60-70,000 years ago(IIRC). Dirty great feckoff eruption screwed the environment and reduced us modern humans in Africa down to a few thousand(likely killed off a load of other archaic folks too). So all humans today are related to that smallish African group. In which case that paper has to be wrong, because we should all then have Neandertal DNA or we all shouldn't but we do, ditto for Denisovan DNA. So yea, game over man, game over...

I dunno SB, I've a couple of problems with that.

1) that's just one site and can hardly be extrapolated to others. The archaeological record in many sites shows Neandertal tool technology datable to later than what they're suggesting. Hell the Gibraltar sites for one. The Chatelperronian sites another example. Now some reckon they aint our beetle browed cousins but I firmly believe they are. OK stone tools don't always give you who the tool user was, but they're generally quite indicative. EG if you find MOusterian tech in Europe, you figure Neandertals, because the moderns were using a slightly different tech before they come here so why would they revert? That's not to say there wasn't crossover of course(mousterian in North Africa for example). Some studies have found the Mousterian toolset can be just as efficient as the later "advanced" modern human stuff. Hardly surprising given the feckers developed it over 300,000 odd years, way longer than we've been around

2) modern humans have Neandertal genes and it turns out Otzi the iceman has more than modern populations(as I predicted a while back). Naturally as he was closer to the event. If we find any more archaic Sapiens DNA I'll put money down it'll have even more, particularly in the Middle East.

3) we also have Denisovan, more in fact if you're from east Asia, so we defo met them.

4) We have the sites in the middle east where it shows we were living cheek by jowl for a few thousand years. Interestingly the dates for that site line up with the dates of the genetic "clocks" for our shared DNA. It's well possible we only got jiggy in that one area or thereabouts. In any numbers anyway and it seems it takes some numbers to stay "in the blood". I look at England as an example. They had an historically recorded influx of Saxons who invaded both culturally and in bums on seats. Yet today the vast majority of that influx has vanished. Only a tiny amount of English people have Saxon DNA in their makeup and not a single line of Saxon female line has survived and we know they were about getting jiggy with the locals. Now maybe this is the rank ill learned amateur talking here, but for moderns to have up to 4% of Neandertal markers in our blood, suggests to me that for a time anyway we were getting jiggy on a pretty regular basis.

Other things may be in play in Europe and it's environs(and the Caucasus) things may well have been very different in the setup. Actually one thing I've noticed over time is how different we are in living areas in Europe. In the middle east we basically occupy the same areas and the same levels within them. In Europe, this changes. We generally take the "high ground" and they take the lower living areas in the valleys. Maybe a defensive thing on our part? I remember as a kid on holliers in Spain and France and noticing a difference compared to Ireland. Over there and ditto for Italy, the oldest villages and towns are on the top of hills for defensive reasons. They had to be what with all the back and forth invasions over many centuries. In Ireland(and the UK) we have some of that, but not nearly to the same degree. Many castles and keeps etc are in the bottom of valleys. More sited for the view than defence They seem to be as much for status and lording it over the locals, rather than any great worry about actual heavy duty defence. I suspect conditions in Europe back in the paleolithic made us more competitive, even aggressive towards each other because of that, hence no evidence yet of European Neandertal/Us jiggy jiggy

The other aspect is while we have quite an amount of Neandertal DNA(compared to other archaics) on file, we don't have that much and it's barely a snapshot of their genetic makeup. We may find later European Neandertals with us in them. These things ain't static. You're unlikely to find "pure" modern and "pure" Neandertal. Certainly there wasn't "One" Neandertal. They varied a fair bit in their bones anyway. You have the classical Neandertal and you also have the more gracile guys and gals. We do as a species love to draw lines and say "this is Black and this is White and this is the line Godammit". In fairness it's what sets us apart in many ways.

Hell, go back 100,000 odd years and we don't look that different. The early moderns from Ethiopia and such have huge feckin browridges and sloping foreheads and big teeth etc. Just to my eye they have a more rounded braincase and less swept back cheekbones and less of a muzzle, but it's not by a huge amount.

As I reckoned on another forum, here's a pic of "modern human" of that time;

and here's a pic of Neandertal;

NOt a lot of diffs going on. We've got a slightly flatter face, but actually we've also got slightly bigger and more globular brows. What f the African lad's skull was found in France and dated to 40,000 years? It would be a head scratcher. I'd reckon they'd say "Neandertal with some "modern" features". I note that Neandertal lad has a "chin" contrary to popular. His projecting mid face overpowers it, but it's there. I would suggest it's a slight case of rather than us gaining a chin, instead we lost the mid face projection.

OK so that was more than a "couple of problems" SB It's me for feck sake. I make the extra hard drives in Boards HQ look like their needed.

slowburner wrote: »

Perhaps there is evidence of 'extinction', but might this particular population not just have moved south?

Exactly. Nail on head SB. They survived for over 200,000 years through all sorts of climactic change including a couple of ice ages and hardly did that by staying put when conditions got iffy. Indeed more primitive humans of some sort have been roaming around Europe as far north as Scotland for nearly a million years. That's why the climate change model doesn't appeal to me as a reason they went extinct. A factor among many yea, but hardly the primary one.

Good question and a complex one. I don't buy the lower technology or lack of adaptability or different diets. Not because of some research that shows their tools were just as good as ours and that they exploited more food sources than once though, but for the same basic reasons I don't buy the climate model. They survived and thrived in different environments over many hundreds of thousands of years doing quite well thanks very much.

My take? They seem to have never been very numerous in the landscape. For example unlike with when we show up, no large animals seem to go extinct with their presence(even with their bigger calorie requirement and unlike wolves etc they target the fittest members of the prey herds). So they were small isolated bands and seem to have been quite narrow genetically, so probably didn't meet up with each other that often. Apex predators like they were tend to be very small in number in an environment anyway and are vulnerable because of that. They appear to have the same birth rate cycle as us, but seem to have had fewer kids. It wouldn't take much of a difference between us on that score over thousands of years to show dfferent population dynamics.

I reckon we were "to blame" but not directly. Of all humans who've been around we grew/grow in numbers the most. Unusual for an apex predator. The others seem to reach an environmental set point/equilibrium and pretty much stay that way. We go beyond that. Why? Maybe we have slightly more kids? Maybe because we need less food so starvation kills fewer of us and it means we can live in smaller ranges? Maybe because we lived longer? This started to happen around 40,000 years ago. For some reason we had more peeps getting to be grandparents, which brings it's own advantages in passing on info.

So the two humans start roughly equal and small in number, but we have slightly more kids, more reach old age and pass on info, more kids means populations grow and bump into each other more and exchange info and tech and culture and genes and that becomes te perfect storm of advantage that quickly snowballs. They don't do that, they don't have the numbers, the Granny factors and wider exchanges of culture and tech and slowly but surely they become a smaller and smaller percentage in the landscape. On top of that as we grow we bump into them more and more. We may get along in some places and get jiggy, in others hostility might break out, in others our increasing numbers may have simply forced those who didn't engage with us to move on like they did in the face of increasing cold in the past, only this time the glaciers were us. This goes on over a very long period of time until there was nowhere really left for them to go to and the last of them simply petered out. Of course leaving some of our better contacts between us in us down to this day and I suspect in some of the last of them there was a fair bit of us in them too, until in most areas there was just "human".

NOt very dramatic, but I reckon more likely. I reckon similar also happened with all the other people who weren't us.

They ate seafood in coastal Spain and Italy too. And processed and consumed grains. Their diet seems to have varied quite a bit depending on environment. Makes sense as they lived through hundreds of thousands of years of changing climates, poncing about in the snow being just one.

They've kinda left out the Denisovans(which have added even more DNA than Neandertals to some Asian populations) and possibly some deeper Erectus adding to our mix, never mind what was extremely likely to have been going on in Africa with other archaic folks.


Mountainsandh if you wanna real time immersive experience of what was likely goin on with our species over the years, take yourself down to a local nightclub and watch. For research purposes of course... We came, we saw, we thought "oh he/she's cute, we came, we conquered.


PS I reckon the French get the nod in these graphs, because they really were at the forefront of research into paleolithic Europe?

Well yes and no and not really at that time, as the whole area down to the thames would have been ice bound and not fit for man nor beast. Yes bears(and other life) would have migrated by way of land bridges, but as the ice melted Ireland was cut off first, so its bear population was isolated from that point on. Britain being connected for much longer to the european mainland(and having areas that were always ice free) allowed different/later bears in. It's also why we lost out on snakes, moles and rabbits among other animals and plants(Ireland before man started bringing stuff along was remarkably narrow an ecosystem compared to say the UK). No doubt this process happened a few times in previous interglacials. The mountain ranges in northern Spain seems to have acted as a similar gene barrier for their bear lines.

dubhthach wrote:

It any modern population closely resemble Otzi the Iceman then it's Sardinians.

They also have higher than average Neandertal genes too. Otzi has much more than modern peoples as he was closer to the event(s). Overall Europeans have slightly higher Neandertal genes than Asians and they have different ones too. This would suggest that it wasn't just in the middle east we broke out the flowers and milk tray and that when we got into Europe we had a few dalliances with each other later on. Otzi's much higher level of Neandertal genes would bolster this model too. If they can process Asian DNA of the same period and it's lower than Otzi it'll seal the deal.

I'll bet the farm that that's exactly what they'll find. Asians with Neandertal DNA mostly picked up in the ME, later picking up other archaic* human lovin from folks already living in Asia, eg Denisovians. Whereas in Europe, they'll find more Neandertal mixing going on from the time we shared Europe with each other.




*I dislike the archaic tag with these guys and gals. Yes around 40,000 years ago we really do seem to have had a real explosion in art and culture and technology, but previous to that there's not a lot between us "modern" humans and the other guys. Indeed the earliest industrial process so far found wasn't invented by us, it was Neandertals who cracked it. They were converting bark pitch into a very strong glue requiring very precise temps and an anaerobic environment. Experimental archaeologists have replicated it in the way they reckon they did it, but with variable degrees of success and with tiny amounts resulting. They still have their secrets. What's really cool is they found an example of a lump of this glue with a neandertal fingerprint on it.

dubhthach wrote: »

I dislike the term archaic as well, personally I think of the difference as more as between Lions and Tigers.

Exactly only even closer than that. Clearly closer as we could have viable and fertile kids with each other. They also look "weird" to us today, but humans have changed quite a bit to look at in the last 40,000 years. Go back 100,000 years and we have big brow ridges, more sloping foreheads, bigger teeth, less of a chin etc. We were slightly taller on average(though one Iranian Neandertal lad was nigh on a six footer) and more gracile and a few minor enough details that mark us out as different but that's about it.

Negrito populations in the Philippines also show Denisovian admixture,

Oh really? That's interesting indeed. Do you know if the Andaman island Negritos show any Denisovian admixture? They look like to have been remnants of the first Africans to run along the coasts outside Africa. I had the notion that they wouldn't find any Denisovian or Neandertal genes in them because they avoided the interior where those guys were living and that it was only later Africans migrated far enough into the hinterlands to encounter and have kids with the "locals".

Then again you'd have to find the most isolate among them as a group today. Even though they are quite separate from the majority population even today, over the last 30,000 years or whatever it gives plenty of time for them to get Denisovian from other moderns in the area. I suppose if they had less than those around them it might show the latter, but if they had more it might show a more ancient influx?

slowburner wrote: »

A very interesting paper that takes a look at the question of Neanderthal versus Modern Human intelligence.
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0096424

Interesting indeed. Though I still beleive at least some of our theories are biased by an eye of the beholder vibe. EG This line from the above paper; Later, the genetic evidence was supported by fossils which showed that Africans were far more modern looking than their Neandertal contemporaries, with dates for the Omo Kibish 1 and Herto skulls in Ethiopia suggesting that the early modern human morphology emerged in East Africa possibly as early as 195,000 year agoEmphasis mine. The joke is that wikipedia and a few other sources on these early moderns actually used to show a cast of a French Neandertal skull... Some still do. Modern looking? About the biggest and most obvious diff is that the brain case of the African folks is much more rounded. They have very large brow ridges similar to Neandertals and also have a very projecting face. There's not that much in it.

Later on those differences really stand out though. The pic there comparing a Neandertal with a fully modern is a little misleading. If you ever get the chance to hold casts of both in your hands the differences are really obvious. The Neandertal is massive across the board. They have huge heads and are much longer front to back than us. The shape of the cheeks of all things also strike you as very different. Never mind a nose which would have put Cyrano DeBergerac to shame If you met one your mind would be thinking "don't mention the nose, god, don't mention the nose. Try not to even look at it for fear of causing offence". Then again maybe big noses were a massive turn on to lady Neandertals. Likely they were and a small modern nose would make you look like a child to them. "Hey small nose" may have been an insult.

I would agree with the main conclusions of the paper that there is little enough good evidence of enough of a difference that would have made us superior. Not before the massive explosion of culture that occurred later on. Go back 100,000 years ago and it would be a brave man who would have called it as to who would win. I'd still go back to the idea that what really made us superior was the capacity for a wider social network. It might have been a tiny seed at first, but as our population grew that seed was what kicked off the major revolution(s). Neandertals, otherwise just as adept as us never had that seed and remained socially narrow, even xenophobic.

I've made the comparison before, but IMHO it fits pretty well. Wolves and dogs. Neandertals have been called "wolves with knives", I'd take that further and suggest their social behaviour was similar. Small familial "packs" with a wide territory that abuts other "packs". Xenophobia and aggression is the order of the day if two packs meet. Outside human hunting the most likely demise for a wolf is at the jaws of another wolf. Nearly every adult male Neandertal shows trauma. This has been explained as being the result of close in hunting accidents, but quite a number of injuries look like blunt force trauma. Evidence of cannibalism of other non related groups has been found in Spain. Wolves tend to be quite narrow genetically, just like Neandertals. Wolves only seek out others when leaving the familial group to find mates. Maybe Neandertals were similar? The more genes we extract may help to show this.

Then we have dogs. Very closely related to wolves, but act very differently. They don't form packs when feral. Instead they form loose associations with others that ebb and flow depending on the environment. Their social hierarchy is looser. They'll mate indiscriminately(including with wolves at times) and have more gene flow going on. They're more open to new experiences throughout life and beyond puppyhood. IE you can teach an old dog new tricks, but not a wolf.

Interestingly where wolves and dogs are in the same area the wolves tend to get squeezed out. They either retreat further away, succumb to novel pathogens or get "bred out". IMH the model of the slow demise of the Ethiopian wolf, especially with regard to the impact of the domestic dogs in the area mirrors what happened with Neandertals and us.

Again if we were to place bets on who would "win" between dogs and wolves most would likely give the wolf the nod. Bigger, stronger, larger brained, more capable hunters(on the surface) with stronger familial bonds compared to dogs. If humans died out tomorrow leaving our pet doggies to roam free, I'll bet that wolves would go extinct in pretty short order. Sound familiar or wha?

slowburner wrote: »

And some pretty speculative stuff published in the National Geographic.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/04/140430-neanderthals-cook-food-evolution-science/

Speculative, but it might have some legs. The fact they made cooked biscuits came as a right shock. As the researcher points out they were also able to control the manufacture of pitch and that's very tricky. Some tantalising finds coming from Spain of very well made wooden items might suggest they could have had bowls, plates, even rudimentary pots. The lack of wood that survives is a real pain. A lot of their tools show wear consistent with woodworking and I strongly suspect they were really adept with wood. Far more than we realise. Maybe more than "us". One area are needles. It's believed they didn't have them, but bone needles show up around us. However unlike bone, wooden needles would have long decayed away unless we get very lucky someday.