Human DNA found in Neanderthal genetic code

Adam Khor

More proof of interbreeding:

http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/neanderthals-mated-modern-humans-much-earlier-previously-thought-study-020748

Linnaeus

I suscribe to Ancient Origins, and have found many thought-provoking articles on this website.

The article you sent about interbreeding corresponds to my idea about modern-type man mating with Neanderthal and other hominins. This mating must have occured in several waves over time, finally ending due to the disappearance of the pre-Sapiens Sapiens species. Frequent mating with Neanderthal would have resulted in the dilution of Cro-Magnon DNA and eventual loss of acquired characteristics. On the other hand, with increasing infusions of Cro-Magnon genes over the generations, the Neanderthal strain would have been watered down to the point of no longer being physiognomically recognizable.

It is most interesting to observe that Homo heidelbergensis, who is apparently more ancient than Neanderthal, nevertheless bears physical characteristics essentially more refined and advanced than those of Neanderthal. Heidelbergensis was taller than Neanderthal, and had the facial features ALMOST of a hybrid, half Cro-Magnon type. How is this to be explained? Heidelberg Man, for all his relatively refined appearance, does not seem to have been an ancestor of modern man. Could a precocious type of Cro-Magnon already have been around 500 thousand B.C.? Might Heidelbergensis have been the result of this Sapiens' interbreeding with early Neanderthals? Maybe we need to push back hominins' chronology even further into the past...Who really can pinpoint the antiquity of man?

Adam Khor

Dunno, ask Wibbs :pac:

Linnaeus

I've asked Wibbs this question and a number of others...But recently I've not had answers from him. Meanwhile, I'm doing a lot of reading about prehistoric man...This Heidelberg fellow intrigues me; some palaeontologists now claim that he, and not Neanderthal, was the first to bury the dead. The Steinheim finds, formerly considered to belong to a separate species, are now being assigned to Homo heidelbergensis.

Adam Khor

Re: burying the dead, there's quite a few animals out there that perform what could be called funeral rituals. Elephants are famously known to gather around their dead in unusual silence and to partially cover their remains with dirt and vegetation.
Corvids are known not only to do the same (already intriguing considering they'll happily feed on the dead bodies of other creatures), but also to seemingly leave symbolic offerings next to their dead (perhaps not so surprising considering they often bond with each other, and sometimes even with people, by offering small tokens as symbols of friendship or even gratitude).
And I witnessed a weird pigeon funeral once; I just can´t describe it in any other way (but will not describe it because that's really the kind of thing you don´t tell people about:B)

Other animals such as apes are also known to perform different death rituals.

Considering all of this, I wouldn´t be surprised if the burying of the dead was actually a much older habit than usually believed (and it may have evolved more than once).

Linnaeus

This is most interesting. I wouldn't doubt it at all: animals can express great affection, devotion and a sense of loss...and not only with members of their own species. I've never heard of dogs burying their owners, yet there are numerous cases of mourning canines which try to UNBURY corpses, literally digging up the soil with their paws in a desperate attempt to behold the beloved human once more. Swans sadly lament the loss of their eggs or chicks. Many species of mammals and especially birds mate for life, never seeking another spouse following the demise of the original one. Some have been known to keen loudly over the cadavers of their mates.

So animals DO comprehend that life is precious, that death puts a sorrowful end to relationships which have enriched their existence on this Earth. Animal burial of some sorts, just as you indicate, may well indicate an attempt to offer a final sign of love and to establish a physical monument of remembrance, in the form of a rudimentary tomb.

Wibbs

I'm most certainly in agreement that animals can show grief and express that in different ways, but ritualised burial in early humans is still IMHO very much up for grabs. I've yet to see a Neandertal body that I'd be close to sure of burial. Including the so called "definite" examples. The "old man of La Chapelle" is one such given and I don't buy it at all. The original early 20th century excavation and recording was all over the place and woefully inaccurate for a start. This was highlighted when they reexamined the site in the last few years. They remeasured and removed the original backfill and the so called grave hollow looked nothing like the more shaped drawings of the original dig. IMHO they were projecting a burial where none existed or the evidence was extremely thin for one. And they're still sticking to that story.

It could be equally explained by the guy wandering into the lowest part of the tiny cave for shelter from a blizzard, dying from exposure there(he was in a classic position for hyperthermic corpses) and being enveloped in a snow drift which would have preserved him from much scavenger activity. When the snow thawed the melt and dirt washing in could have then covered his body. There's another French example where it's claimed they placed a large slab of rock over the body. Utter nonsense as the original dig diagrams and photos show. The body rolled into the deepest corner of the cave and was subsequently covered by cave ceiling collapses. You could have put the body in any number of places in the base of the cave and could claim coverage.

The question about these and other "burials" from both the yay and nay camp is the absence of grave goods. The nay's claim this means they weren't burials. Again IMH this is approached from a modern human perspective. Indeed the lack of grave goods suggests to me at least some element of other living Neandertals deliberately engaging with the dead body. In life they would have traveled with a personal tool kit of stone and wooden tools and the like. If they died and were buried rapidly by a purely natural event you'd find such items with them, but you don't(the Old man may have been later found after the snow melted and his tools taken and possibly buried then but..). The only ones I can think of like that were some associated finds with the Iranian Shanidar guys(some who were killed by a rock fall) and the associations are pretty thin. Some Neandertal children seem to have been buried alright, but it's haphazard indeed and there's little sense of reverence involved in the disposal of the bodies. In other examples from Spain the dead have been defleshed and the long bones split open for the marrow, so in times of stress or territorial disputes feeding on others was on the table(no pun ). Those Spanish examples were very closely related so look like a familial group, maybe killed by another group in the area?

My general hunch would be that the dead were respected to some degree and certainly they would have felt the awful loss, but ritual as we'd think of it was limited and the first true ritual burials that are not in doubt are made by us and they're really obviously ritual in nature.

Heidelbergensis? The idea for this again comes from Spain(Atapuerca) and the bodies found in one cave system and a possible grave good in the form of a beautifully shaped "hand axe"(they even nicknamed it "excalibur"). The thing is we don't know what the ritual was, if it was one. Was it an offering to an earth god? Was it a way to dispose of enemies? And I say if it was one, because while there is an unusual concentration of human bones, there are also a scattering of animal bones and most troubling is the lack of smaller bones that you would expect if bodies fell in, or were placed complete. One explanation I'd put out there and one I've not seen elsewhere is that it might have been a midden for dumping the remains of cannibalism. Hence the concentration of bones, but also the lack of the smaller bones as the bodies would have been butchered above ground, the meat removed and only large bones like skulls thrown into the hole.

As for modernity in Heidelbergensis, they carry more primitive features than Neandertals and way more than modern humans, even early moderns. If you lined them up on a table out of order and rearranged them by features ancient and modern they'd certainly come before Neandertals and would follow chronological order. Though for me there is too much "this is a species and that's a species" when it comes to human evolution. It's much more a gradual change over time and features ono tend to become set through long periods of isolation. Even within Neandertals they vary from earlier "classic" types to later ones. Modern humans changed quite a bit from the first examples. We started off far more robust with bigger brow ridges(rivalling Neandertals), smaller chins, much bigger teeth etc. If you brought a homo sapiens from say 120,000 years ago down to today he or she would most certainly stand out as "odd". These are all very subtle differences.

Linnaeus

Thanks, Wibbs. Your comments and observations are worth taking into consideration.

If I may add a few comments of my own...

We may have little direct evidence of Neanderthal burying his dead; but, considering the fact that he was human and perhaps on an intellectual par with certain primitive tribes which still exist today, and which do inter the dead, I don't see why Neanderthal WOULDN'T have buried them, if only to dispose in a tidy way of decomposing corpses. As I suggested in previous posts, Neanderthal, in spite of a lack of demonstrable spiritual beliefs, may have practised ritual magic, as is still common among the most isolated, un-Christianized tribes. Placing the cadavers in tombs may have been their way to prevent the dead from returning to haunt the settlement.

From what I have read, at least, Homo heidelbergensis represents an aesthetically more "comely", more modern type than Neanderthal. The heavy, protruding brow ridges persist in Heidelbergensis, however. Now, in my opinion as an amateur...for what it's worth...these ridges are typical of most "archaic" humans, but definitely distinguish the archaics from the modern Sapiens Sapiens type. Perhaps the fossils which have been classified as very early specimens of Sapiens S...individuals of robust build which still have pronounced brow ridges... are in fact nothing of the kind. They might represent an advanced Heidelbergensis or a hybrid between an "archaic" type and a true early Sapiens S. Every year, new discoveries and theories seem to push back modern man's antiquity to surprisingly early periods. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Cro-Magnon was developing independently of the archaic humans even before Heidelbergensis came on the scene (proposed dates for Heidelberg Man vary, but are in the range of 1 million-800,000 B.C. to 500,000 B.C.).

Wibbs

Linnaeus wrote: »

We may have little direct evidence of Neanderthal burying his dead; but, considering the fact that he was human and perhaps on an intellectual par with certain primitive tribes which still exist today, and which do inter the dead, I don't see why Neanderthal WOULDN'T have buried them, if only to dispose in a tidy way of decomposing corpses.

Well we know they sometimes ate them as one means of disposal. The burial for hygiene aspect has more weight behind it. One of the Shanidar guys looks like that sort of interment. Ritual? I'm not so sure.

Yes I most certainly class them as human, but I would also suspect they were very different humans to us culturally, at least the us from around 50,000 years ago to today. The evidence shows them to be small in number and extremely isolated in their environment. Genetically as well as geographically(and culturally. Ideas travelled very slowly). It suggests high territoriality. I would suspect what culture they had, body paint, possible jewellery etc were very local group belonging markers, a more advanced version of marking their territory. This might explain why what appear to be the ritual use of eagle feathers in one group has only been found in that one group(so far). That was their marker, so another group copying that wouldn't occur to them.

This mode of thinking may also explain why and when we had kids with them and more importantly when we seem to have stopped. The genetic tags so far found are before, sometimes way before the explosion of modern human culture and art around 40,000 years ago. My theory would be that before that (very)general date we were similar enough in outlook and behaviour to them, so mate exchange was culturally acceptable for both if we were meeting in the same general area. After we start painting caves and carving ivory and changing the cultural maps beyond recognition, we drift too far apart, we become too different and the sexual encounters really drop off. It seems to match up.

From what I have read, at least, Homo heidelbergensis represents an aesthetically more "comely", more modern type than Neanderthal. The heavy, protruding brow ridges persist in Heidelbergensis, however. Now, in my opinion as an amateur...for what it's worth...these ridges are typical of most "archaic" humans, but definitely distinguish the archaics from the modern Sapiens Sapiens type.

Yes we lost them fairly rapidly alight. Our faces started to look more like "juvenile" archaics.

Adam Khor

In other words, we went neotenic :B

Linnaeus

Hello Wibbs,

Thanks for your reply.

I completely agree with you that Neanderthal was ANOTHER KIND of human; similar to us in certain aspects, but in matters of culture, spirituality, creativity, very different. You and I have both remarked that Homo Sapiens Sapiens is indeed a unique being. Before him, hominins' outlook on the world was strictly limited to local day-to-day practical experience. Cro-Magnon, with his huge capacity for imagination and effervescent artistic production, went far beyond. He revolutionized prehistory with his fresh, dynamic intellectual concepts and his attempts...right from the start...to undertake scientific/technical research. Of course, this began in a very humble, tentative way; but it began with Homo Sapiens Sapiens, to his great credit.

I still cannot imagine Cro-Magnon, with his refined facial features and considerably increased IQ , to have sprung from the archaic types. There is too much physiological, mental and intellectual difference between him and the Neanderthal/Denisovan/Heidelberg types. These were characterized by the famous heavy brows, heavy corporal build, large teeth, absence of chins and, of course, those rather elongated, flattened braincases containing brains which, I am convinced, lacked certain important cognitive and creative powers such as modern man possesses. The archaics seem to have been natural dead-end experiments. When Homo S.S. appears on the scene, he seems to have fallen out of the blue, with no recognizable immediate ancestors anywhere around. If there is indeed a missing link that could plausibly link this new vastly improved species with the hominids that went before, we have not yet discovered it.

As for cannibalism...Do you think that Neanderthals occasionally murdered each other, and then devoured the corpses? Or did they just eat individuals which died of natural causes, injuries etc.? What material evidence do we have that they practised cannibalism?