Picture a Cave...not just any Cave.............
A Younger Neanderthal
Dating of Bones Changes
Picture of Humans in
Europe
The remains of Neanderthals were found
in this cave at Vindija, Croatia. They
lived not far from modern humans.
Questions remain about how they
interacted.
(Fred Smith/Northern Illinois University)
By Kenneth Chang
ABCNEWS.com
Oct. 25 ? New dating of Neanderthal bones
indicates that the evolutionary cousins of
modern humans survived later in central Europe
than had been thought and shared the continent
with their successors for several millennia.
The finding, reported in Tuesday?s issue of the
Proceedings of the
National Academy of
Sciences, overturns the
traditional notion that
as modern humans
spread from Africa and
the Middle East into
Europe, they drove the
supposedly more
primitive Neanderthals
westward and
eventually to extinction.
European Neighbors
?Into that picture come these Croatian dates which show
there were Neanderthals living in the hills of Croatia 3,000
years after there were early modern humans established in
Germany, a couple hundred kilometers away,? says Erik
Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in
St. Louis and one of the paper?s authors
The overlap in time and place provides an opportunity
for interbreeding between the two species of hominids and
the possibility that Neanderthal genes persist to the
present.
?Neanderthals may have been driven to extinction in
some areas,? Trinkaus says, ?or they may have been
absorbed into early modern human populations in others,?
Neanderthals, primitive hominids with prominent
brows, coarse jaws and short legs, are thought to have
arisen in Africa more than 250,000 years ago. They are
thought to have appeared in Europe about 120,000 years
ago and eventually to have been replaced by modern
humans.
Modern humans arrived in Europe at least 32,000
years ago and possibly as early as 36,000 years ago.
Newer Dating
Trinkaus and his
collaborators examined
Neanderthal bones
originally dug up from a
Croatian cave a century
ago. Radiocarbon dating
on pill-size samples from
two skulls put their age at
28,000 years old. The
Neanderthal specimens
had earlier been dated at
45,000 years using a less accurate method.
?It just makes the picture of the relationship between
modern humans and Neanderthals far more complicated
than it was before,? comments Jan Simek, head of the
anthropology department at University of Tennessee,
Knoxville. ?You?re not talking about one advanced form
and an animal. They were all people.?
The notion that Neanderthals and humans interbred
remains a controversial one, however. ?You could argue
that they lived apart in the same area and threw rocks at
each other instead of genes,? says Clark Howell of the
University of California, Berkeley.
Europeans a Mixed Breed?
Trinkaus and lead author Fred Smith of Northern Illinois
University point to 25,000-year-old remains of a human
child found in Portugal whose legs, arms, teeth and skull
show Neanderthal-like characteristics.
?Our interpretation of that ? these populations were
intermixed and these traits persisted over a number of
generations,? Trinkaus says. ?It tells us that interbreeding
took place.?
Smith and Trinkaus say there are body features in
bones from 30,000-year-old human specimens that
suggest a Neanderthal contribution to the European gene
pool.
Others such as Howell say the characteristics in the
skeletons that Trinkaus and Smith attribute to Neanderthal
are within the range of normal variations for humans.
Tests on Neanderthal DNA have suggested it is too
different to be human, but that assertion is also
controversial.
There is as yet no definitive evidence of Neanderthals
and humans being at exactly the same place at the same
time.
?We don?t have evidence of them directly meeting or
coming into contact with each other in Croatia or southern
Germany,? Trinkaus says. ?But we know they weren?t all
that far apart at the same time.? |
