"Neanderthals might have an unfair bad rap.
Popular culture has often depicted our Neanderthal cousins as stupid, unsophisticated brutes whose nomadic-hunter lifestyle precluded them from social gatherings and might have contributed to their demise.
But a growing body of research shows these extinct relatives -- who overlapped in time and space with anatomically modern humans, or Homo sapiens -- were similar to us in many ways. Recent studies suggest Neanderthals altered the landscape around them with fire and were sophisticated hunters who could exploit a variety of prey in groups larger than paleoanthropologists once thought.
Studies show the species used fire to cook, constructed tools to manipulate meat and stone, built structures and made jewelry. They swam and dove for shells, which they used as tools and beads, and distilled birch bark to make tar. Neanderthals decorated and engraved bones and used red ochre -- a natural clay pigment -- to alter surfaces.
"The more we learn about Neanderthals, the more similar they look to us behaviorally," said Chris Stringer, research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum in London.
Scientists have discovered, too, that Neanderthals buried their dead in a fashion -- at one site in Iraq named Shanidar, fossilized pollen showed flowers might have been involved in such an interment. They also cared for their sick and injured peers, and combined twisted fibers into string that could have been used to make nets, mats, baskets or fabric.
Homo sapiens and Neanderthals evolved largely separately in Africa and Eurasia over hundreds of thousands of years. However, within 20,000 years of the two species crossing paths in Europe and western Asia about 60,000 years ago, Neanderthals had completely disappeared from the fossil record.
Yet DNA extracted from ancient bones and teeth show Neanderthals live on in a tiny bit of many present-day humans' genes. About 2% of DNA in the genomes of people of European or Asian descent is inherited from these cousins -- the result of ancient interbreeding between the two species.
"The species lines are surprisingly blurred," said Briana Pobiner, a Smithsonian Institution paleoanthropologist. "So if you know modern humans and Neanderthals mated, did we assimilate them? Did we conquer them?"
The paleogenetic record suggests it is almost certainly the former, according to Dr. Rasmus Nielsen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "We integrated with Neanderthals. They went extinct by love, it wasn't war."
Since the species' discovery more than 150 years ago, scientists have uncovered bones and teeth from about 400 Neanderthals, known officially as Homo neanderthalensis. These fossils revealed a shorter, stockier species with robust chests and limbs. Neanderthals had a longer skull with pronounced brows and sweptback cheekbones, physically quite distinguishable from the earliest humans.
Genetic and fossil evidence shows Neanderthals thrived across Europe and western Asia between about 400,000 and 40,000 years ago -- weathering a climate that vacillated from a glacier-dominated Ice Age to mild, interglacial periods that resemble the Northern Hemisphere today.
A February study showed how Neanderthals living on the Iberian Peninsula harvested and ate brown crabs, bringing them back to a cave to roast on a fire.
"They had to know about the tides and crab behavior," said Mariana Nabais, an archaeologist at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution in Spain who co-wrote the study. "It shows abstract thinking, it shows planning, it shows that they understood the environment where they were living."
Our cousins also consumed tortoises, rabbits, birds, fish and shellfish, Dr. Nabais added.
Another recent study, published in the journal Science Advances, suggests Neanderthals also hunted and butchered straight-tusked, Ice Age elephants. The research, based on fossil evidence from a 125,000-year-old site named Neumark-Nord in Germany, suggests Neanderthals might have gathered there in larger-than-expected groups at times to consume meat.
The authors looked at thousands of tusks, teeth and bones from about 60 elephants that showed Neanderthals who had gathered at Neumark-Nord flayed meat off bones using tools, and then possibly roasted or dried their catch. One 11-ton elephant could feed 25 people for three months, or 100 people for a month, or 350 people for a week, they calculated.
Such gatherings help upend the idea that Neanderthals were primarily nomadic hunter-gatherers that stuck to small groups all the time." [1]
1. World News: Scientific Discoveries Elevate the Minds and Skills of Neanderthals
Woodward, Aylin. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 11 Apr 2023: A.16.
Komentarų nėra:
Rašyti komentarą