Encyclopedia of Evolution.pdf - Online Reading Center

0 Neolithic
Neandertals lived short lives. The Neandertal who was
oldest at death, the “old man of Shanidar,” was about 40
years old when he died. All Homo sapiens societies, in the
prehistoric past as now, included some individuals older than
this. Because Homo sapiens societies, especially after the
beginning of agriculture, had high levels of infant mortality,
there may have been no difference between the average life
spans of Neandertals and modern humans until recent centuries.
However, many anthropologists point out that old people
in human societies are important repositories of cultural
information, a repository that Neandertals would not have
had (see life history, evolution of).
What Happened to the Neandertals?
Neandertals died away from most of Europe beginning about
40,000 years ago. The most recent known Neandertal skeleton,
27,000 years old, was found in Zafarraya Cave in Spain.
The disappearance of the Neandertals paralleled the movement
of Homo sapiens across Europe during that time. The
conclusion seems inescapable that modern humans drove the
Neandertals into extinction. This would not have required
warfare and slaughter; indeed, there is no evidence that the
Cro-Magnon killed any Neandertals at all. Few anthropologists
would want to place a wager that a Cro-Magnon, even
with bows and arrows (which Neandertals did not have),
could win a fight against a Neandertal. But most anthropologists
conclude that the superior social cohesion of modern
humans, reinforced by art and religion, allowed Homo
sapiens societies to displace Neandertal societies from the
environments that had the most resources. Neandertals were
marginalized into areas with little food, where their reproduction
declined and where they eventually became extinct.
For several decades, most anthropologists have concluded
that Neandertals did not evolve into any modern
group of humans, nor are any of their genes surviving in
our populations. A true test of this hypothesis, however,
would require a sample of Neandertal DNA. DNA represents
a repository of ancient evolutionary events (see DNA
[evidence for evolution]). Homo sapiens has one of the
lowest levels of DNA variability of any species, which most
scientists take as evidence that all humans have evolved from
a recent African origin, perhaps only 100,000 to 200,000
years ago, and that even since that time the entire human species
has gone through a genetic bottleneck (see population
genetics) in which there were few survivors. If Neandertals
and Homo sapiens evolved separately from hominins such
as Homo heidelbergensis, then Neandertal DNA should be
very different from the DNA of any modern human group.
If Europeans evolved from Neandertals, while other humans
evolved separately from earlier hominins, then Neandertal
DNA would be within the range of modern human DNA
variability. The chances of finding Neandertal DNA seemed
pretty slim. However, geneticist Svante Pääbo and others have
found enough fragments of mitochondrial DNA from three
different samples of Neandertal bone, including one from the
original bones found in the Neander Valley, that they could
compare it with the corresponding mitochondrial DNA in
modern humans. Differing from modern human mitochon-
drial DNA by 27 out of 379 of the nucleotides, Neandertal
DNA was completely outside the range of modern humans.
Some anthropologists have suggested that the Neandertals
disappeared by interbreeding with modern humans. Most
anthropologists have not been convinced that the 24,000-yearold
skeleton of a child found in Portugal was a hybrid between
Neandertals and modern humans. The supposed Neandertal
characteristics were not very clear, and there is a gap of thousands
of years between the age of this specimen and the age of
the last known pure Neandertal. Neandertals and Homo sapiens
lived in adjacent caves in the Middle East (for example,
both Neandertal and human caves have been found near Mt.
Carmel and Bethlehem in Israel) for about 40,000 or 50,000
years. There is no evidence that modern humans and Neandertals
interbred during this long period. The 50,000-year
coexistence of Neandertals and moderns in the Middle East
has puzzled some scholars, but others have pointed out that
during this time even the modern humans had only the same
Mousterian tools upon which Neandertals also relied.
Therefore the Neandertals live on at most only in legend
but probably not even there, for most popular conceptions of
them postdate the discovery of their bones in the 19th century.
The Neandertals could be said to represent a parallel
experiment in humanization. They evolved big brains and
social life independently of modern humans but did not have
art and religion. They represent the closest thing scientists
may ever find to what an ape, with advanced intelligence but
without art and religion, would be like.
Further Reading
Finlayson, Clive. Neanderthals and Modern Humans: An Ecological
and Evolutionary Perspective. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2004.
Gore, Rick. “Neandertals.” National Geographic, January 1996,
2–35.
Klein, Richard G., and Blake Edgar. The Dawn of Human Culture:
A Bold New Theory on What Sparked the “Big Bang” of Human
Consciousness. New York: John Wiley, 2002.
Krings, M., et al. “Neandertal DNA sequences and the origin of
modern humans.” Cell 90 (1997): 19–30.
———, et al. “DNA sequence of the mitochondrial hypervariable
region II from the Neandertal type specimen.” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences USA 96 (1999): 5,581–5,585.
Mellars, Paul. The Neanderthal Legacy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1995.
Ovchinnikov, I. V., et al. “Molecular analysis of Neanderthal DNA
from the northern Caucasus.” Nature 404 (2000): 490–493.
Richards, M. P., et al. “Neandertal diet at Vindija and Neandertal
predation: The evidence from stable isotopes.” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences USA 97 (2000): 7,663–7,666.
Shreeve, James. The Neandertal Enigma: Solving the Mystery of
Modern Human Origins. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
Stringer, Christopher, and Clive Gamble. In Search of the Neanderthals.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1993.
Trinkaus, Eric. “Neandertal mortality patterns.” Journal of Archaeological
Science 22 (1995): 121–142.
Neolithic See technology.