Neanderthals' demise caused by modern human invasion

[ej510]

Source: Guardian

Homo sapiens from Africa swarming into Europe outnumbered neanderthals by 10 to one 40,000 years ago, claim scientists

Neanderthals in Europe were overrun by a huge invasion of African homo sapiens 40,000 years ago, which may explain their demise, claim Cambridge scientists. Photograph: Alamy


Homo sapiens from Africa swarming into Europe outnumbered neanderthals by 10 to one 40,000 years ago, claim scientists

Neanderthals in Europe were overrun by a huge invasion of African homo sapiens 40,000 years ago, which may explain their demise, claim Cambridge scientists. Photograph: Alamy

Neanderthals died out in Western Europe after a surge of modern humans arrived from Africa and made them a minority in their own land, researchers claim.

The swarm of homo sapiens onto the continent more than 40,000 years ago left the neanderthals, who had thrived in the frigid conditions for 300 millennia, outnumbered by a massive 10 to one.

The invasion of so many modern humans overturned the neanderthals' domination of the land and forced them into fierce competition for food, fuel and other crucial resources.

The scenario, described by Paul Mellars, emeritus professor of prehistory and human evolution at Cambridge University, and his colleague, Jennifer French, is the latest attempt by scientists to explain the mystery of the neanderthals' demise.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jul/28/neanderthals-demise-modern-human-invasion

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[Incitatus]

2. I call BS. Earth is only 5,000 years old.

:sarcasm:

[brooklynite]

3. The Homo Sapiens probably rode in on dinosaurs...

[Kennah]

8. Jesus rode a velociraptor into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday

[skyounkin]

12. I am an atheist...

but the thought of Jesus riding a velociraptor is pretty fucking cool.

[Kennah]

30. I'm almost there. Still an agnostic.

And I agree, Jesus, velociraptor, fucking cool!

[aaaaaa5a]

14. They are not Dinosaurs... they're Jesus Horses!

Those are the kinds of mistakes you make when you listen to scientists!


You liberals just don't understand history!


Did you know that Jesus was a conservative republican?

[brooklynite]

18. Is that a Sinosauropteryx in his lap, or is he just happy to see us?

[and-justice-for-all]

43. That is bloody brilliant!!!!

[aaaaaa5a]

15. How many times do I have to post this.

There is no such thing as evolution!


There is no such thing as global warming!


There is no such thing as regional adaptations!


The world is flat!


The sun revolves around the Earth!


Gays can be cured of sin!


Women should always obey men!


The Bush tax cuts worked!


Christians are never terrorists!


I am Republican.... HEAR ME ROAR!


Damn you mathematicians, scientists, historians, northern elites, the college educated, city "folk", and those of rational liberal thought!


:sarcasm:

[Kennah]

31. OK, now fess up.

You copied and pasted that from Michelle Bachmann's website, didn't you?

[aaaaaa5a]

41. HA! nt

[Wednesdays]

4. Exactly. That guy has an "Oh, shit. Here they come!" expression on his face.

[roguevalley]

26. okay, now that everyone has vented their bullshit file, how about

the story? Interesting story about a people with bigger brains than modern man and who interbred with modern man they have found recently. I love them.

[w4rma]

29. Bigger brains to accomidate bigger eyeballs. Maybe. (nt)

[Piltdown13]

48. Bigger brains to accommodate a bigger body, probably.

:-)

Neandertals were shorter than us, but more massive on average. Their brain/body ratio was actually pretty similar to ours.

[No Elephants]

32. "There goes the neighborhood."

[demosincebirth]

5. We still have some in the U.S.

[formercia]

6. complaining about the Invasion of people from Africa and the Middle East

"Are White people the Modern Neanderthals?" They ask.

[daleo]

51. Actually, this would make them the ultimate mixed race people

Which turns a lot of racial purity theories on their heads. That's a good thing all around, in my opinion. It would be best if humanity accepted it's very complicated origins, without religious or racial mythologies being privileged.

[onehandle]

7. The Neanderthals are getting their revenge in the U.S. Congress.

'Fierce competition for food, fuel and other crucial resources,' indeed.

[Warpy]

9. Modern evidence suggests we interbred them out of existence.

I don't know what that apelike creature is supposed to be in the OP, but the people who left Africa likely closely resembled the !Kung people in South Africa, the Genographic Project confirming this. Recent forensic reconstruction of Neanderthal faces makes them look quite recognizably human, albeit shorter and more compact with differently shaped heads, well suited to Ice Age Europe. We also know from retrieved DNA that they were fair skinned with red and blond hair, and that they had hyoid bones, making them fully capable of human speech.

The Neanderthals weren't the only other human species out there, either, and likely the African migrants interbred with all of them to produce other regional types.

Personally, since Neaderthals were known to care for the infirm and ritually bury the dead, I find it oddly comforting that we carry them with us rather than having starved or slaughtered them out of existence.

Genographic project: https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/index.html

Neanderthal facial reconstructions: http://archive.peabody.yale.edu/exhibits/fossils/fossils/neanderthal.html

http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/~zolli/CAP/Gib2.htm

(There's also a female but the reconstruction showed her as dirty, ratty haired and bad tempered showing the bias of the museum people so I didn't include it. She might have looked that way in life, but the clean reconstructions are a more accurate example of what they actually looked like when they cleaned up)

[Uncle Joe]

13. I agree with your take on it, Warpy.

:thumbsup:

[Spider Jerusalem]

20. The presence of Neandertal genes in the genome of non-African humans...

only requires a few mating instances, potentially quite isolated; eventually those genes acquired from such mating would spread throughout the H. sapiens population. (40,000 years is roughly 1600 generations, and it's estimated that all people of European ancestry are related within about 40 generations, give or take, so it wouldn't have taken that long, relatively speaking, for the Neandertal contribution to the human gene pool to spread throughout Eurasia).

I've seen a theory that male H. sapiens/H. neandertalensis offspring may have been subject to hybrid sterility, explaining the absence of H. neandertalensis Y-chromosomes in modern human populations and also the results of recent findings that non-African H. sapiens X chromosomes have a Neandertal origin (see here).

[FarCenter]

21. Neandertal and modern humans mated in the Middle East

The few percent of Neandertal DNA is similar in Europeans and Asians, including Papuans and Australian aborigines. So the mating must have been in the Middle East, shortly after they left Africa.

However, the Asians also exhibit a few percent of Denisovan genes as well, so further mating with that population occured further east.

[Spider Jerusalem]

22. Yes, I'm aware...

hence "Eurasia" and not "Europe" (I just used the relatedness of Europeans within historical times as an illustration of genetic spread throughout a population).

[No Elephants]

35. If so, they were a species that would have burdened the planet a lot less, if the species had been

able to survive at all. The superior ability of our species to reproduce is the good news and the bad news.

[FarCenter]

23. The !Kung and other click language speakers were largely replace by Bantu speaker

Bantu speakers spread over much of sub-Saharan Africa replacing most of the click language speakers, pygmies, and other earlier groups.

[No Elephants]

34. Not to libel any species, but interbreeding can be the result of rape.

[aquart]

39. Actually, I'm sure we did both.

[Xithras]

45. I was talking to one of our biology prof's about that yesterday evening.

She pointed out something interesting. Traditional evolutionary thought states that white people are white, and asians are lighter brown, because they lived in areas with less sunlight and the body had to compensate by lowering melanin levels to increase vitamin D production. This theory, however, has always had two problems.

First, the rate at which the change would have needed to occur would have been phenomenal. Current theories state that the change happened in a period of less than 15,000 years, but a change that fast would have required both a huge mortality rate and a very small population. We know that neither was true. Given the health of modern black people in northern climates, we know that the impact of low sunlight is real, but it isn't going to lead to a 50% mortality rate. Second, Asian people and Afro-Asians/Australoids have lived side by side for at least 15,000 years. If an evolutionary bias to solar activity was the sole cause, both races should have approximately the same skin color. They don't. Not yet anyway. In reality, the change from the "black" African skin to "white" European skin should have taken at least 100,000 years. The change from "black" African skin to "brown" Asian skin should have taken at least 75,000.

Neanderthals lived in Eurasia for more than 500,000 years, and their populations were never large. They had the time, the limited mobility, and the restricted breeding populations to make that change. Moreover, we now now from DNA analyses that Neanderthals were as white as they come. Their skin had completed the adaptation to lower light levels.

Her theory was simple. The first modern Homo Sapiens left Africa, and would have been black. As they moved north, they would have experienced minor health issues related to vitamin D deprivation. A certain subset of this population interbred with the native Neanderthals, and a portion of their offspring would have been lighter skinned, or even white, like their neanderthal ancestors. The improved vitamin D production resulting from their mixed parentage would have given them a reproductive advantage over the non-interbred humans, which allowed those offspring to take over Eurasia.

In other words, the lighter skin on Europeans and Asians is a direct byproduct of our Neanderthal ancestry. People have theorized this before, but the new confirmation that Neanderthal DNA exists in all Eurasian populations bolsters it quite a bit.

And those Afro-Asians/Australoids? They are the descendants of early homo sapiens populations that did NOT interbreed. They resemble modern Africans because they still share the same original homo sapiens blueprint.

[supernova]

56. Fascinating.

Thank you.

Boy, this is gonna give the KKK and neo Nazis fits.

[Xithras]

58. It's just a theory, but it makes sense.

The presence of Neanderthal DNA in European and Asian populations is a strong indicator that the theory may be true, but it will take quite a bit more study to confirm it (if it's even confirmable...Neanderthals were very close to us genetically, and it may be impossible to differentiate some genes between the species). If true, it would force us to rethink our entire concept of neanderthals being "extinct".

As to your second point...I'm sure the halfwit racists will just adapt their ideology to fit the new information. Or they'll just deny it. They don't think all that logically.

[woo me with science]

10. That might be a record for modern journalism.

Six one-sentence paragraphs in a row saying exactly the same thing.

Oh, wait...some of that was the repeated photo caption.

Still, surreal to read.

[existentialist]

11. Not rapid enough, however, to stop

interbreeding.

I don't have a cite handy but I remember reading a Scientific American article wherein about 5% of modern European genetic material was believed to be derived from Neanderthals.


They may have made war, but they also made love.

[rug]

16. European neanderthals are still objecting to immigration from the south.

[skyounkin]

17. And in 2011...

hopefully history will repeat itself.

[Safetykitten]

19. The Homo Sapiens worked for less pebbles. Therefore destroying the Neanderthals economy...

[FLPanhandle]

24. We were the ultimate influx of illegal immigrants.

The Neanderthals needed a better immigration policy I guess.

[dipsydoodle]

25. Its also associated with

the fact the modern humans were already living longer as as such were able to teach their young.

[JAnthony]

42. Yes, Homo Sapiens babies have a longer period of childhood,

skull and brain grow over a longer period of time into adulthood, 14-20 yrs.

The Neanderthal child probably reached adulthood at 10 or less.

Very simple tools used by Neanderthal were roughly the same for hundred thousand years or more, with no improvements or technological breakthroughs.

The Homo Sapiens rather quickly developed systems of inter-tribal cooperation between villages, suggesting language, the use of symbols for finding game to kill, etc.

[Kablooie]

27. Demise? What are you talking about? Who's screwing up the House right now, huh?

[Rincewind]

28. More proof

that illegal immigration has always been a problem.

[No Elephants]

36. Hard to be an undocumented immigrant before the Egyptians invented paper.

Your tablets, please, citizen!

[Kennah]

33. Perhaps the demise of the Neanderthals could be summed up this way.

"Oh, it's twue. It's twue. It's twue, it's twue!"

[No Elephants]

37. Everything I've heard about Neanderthas in the last 20 years, I read in Clan of the Cave Bear first.

[buckrogers1965]

38. Neanderthals live on in our myths.

Grendel, ogres, and giants are all stories from the earliest times of our history about large, not very smart, but powerfully strong opponents that we defeated in order to gain territory. Sounds a lot like a description of a Neanderthal after a game of telephone.

[Evasporque]

40. I guess it wasn't so simple...

That even a cave man could do it...

[and-justice-for-all]

44. Neanderthals still exist...we just call them teabaggers now..nt

[BNJMN]

46. Alas, all is as the honorable Elijah Muhammad prophesied.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_supremacy#Black_Muslim_groups

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakub_(Nation_of_Islam)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_athletic_superiority#.22Black_athletic_superiority.22

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3455741
Huzzah, now the devils know as well.

[Ter]

47. That picture is so wrong, they likely did not look like that

Scientists now say they looked much less ape-like then previously thought. They say they looked more like us, like this:

[unkachuck]

49. "Neanderthals died out in Western Europe after a surge of modern humans..."

....I don't believe it....Neanderthals didn't die out, they evolved....they became Republicans....

[Kennah]

52. That's just plain mean and insulting to Neanderthals

As penance, go say three Aloundas, two Harakas, and one Zug-Zug.

[lunatica]

50. I have my doubts about these theories

There was so much space on the planet at that time that no one overran anyone and no one threatened anyone's food supplies. Scientists assume humans have always been warmongers and the chances of that are very small when you have to spend every waking moment hunting for or gathering food. Groups were most likely too small to be a threat or to devastate their environment. Besides, wars are created by people who are greedy and want to be kings, or as explained in another way wars are created by sociopaths who want power over others. War is not a paramount human activity that overrides other basic needs. If you think about it most people are quite peaceful and have a live and let live attitude, unless their whipped up by psychopathic leaders (government or church) into a frenzy of hate. Leaders are the one's who invariably create wars and send their otherwise peace loving citizens to war.

I think they all just mixed together until the pure neanderthals were absorbed by the larger human groups.

[supernova]

One of my armchair hobbies

is prehistoric early man and the development of civilizations.

I saw a documentary last year about this topic. The archeologists interviewed dug at both Neantherthal and HS camp sites. What they were saying is that over a long period of time while the Neanderthals flourished, ~200,000 years. they didn't seem to deviate from their culture at all. They were hunters. They hunted big game like Elk and cave bears and the mega fauna that followed. They cut and used tools, which did not change very much over time. From the record, it didn't seem as if they invented new tools over time, either. They probably worshipped their gods too and buried their dead. They most certainly had an oral tradition of some kind.

In contrast, our forbears left behind all sorts of evidence of eating whatever was nearby, be it big game, or fish, deciding which plants were edible, which were poisonous. Our tools, changed over time, becoming more refined and invented new ones as the need arose. In short, we were able to adapt our thinking to our environments. It appears so far, that the Neanderthals were not successful at that. If they had we might still be living together on the planet.

[supernova]

55. Dupe

I hope this glitch is fixe in DU3. :-)

[robcon]

53. Headline is misleading. There was no invasion... no attack.

It was a migration, not an invasion.

[tabasco]

59. Invasion.

invasion

–noun
1.
an act or instance of invading or entering as an enemy, especially by an army.
2.
the entrance or advent of anything troublesome or harmful, as disease.
3.
entrance as if to take possession or overrun: the annual invasion of the resort by tourists.

[Major Hogwash]

54. I thought the Neandrathals came to the US and later on established the Tea Party.

You can tell they both have similar traits, the Neanderthal was known for knuckle dragging, and they never agreed to raise the debt ceiling either.

Of course, this all is just theory at this stage of the game, but since they are currently building a museum in Kentucky where homo sapiens are interacting with dinosaurs, I think my theory has as much vailidity as their so-called "museum".

Excuse me, while I puke.

[JAnthony]

57. Those are the ones that originated in Alaska, they gave up their

jobs, their hunting and fishing and digging for oil, and moved into a big bus....stopping to drop off books and promote other items of their mythology, like taxes kill jobs, and no taxes make jobs, or the myth that the Dimocrat pahteee is filled with atheist, god-fearing socialists.

Some say one or two of them can still be seen to gather together, or to make appearances several times a week on Fox News.