Cool

45,000-Year-Old Man Was Human-Neanderthal Mix

Project leader Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London explained to Discovery News that the Siberian man belonged to a population that was closely related to the ancestors of today’s Europeans and Asians. He carried only slightly more Neanderthal DNA than they do.

“But his genomic segments of Neanderthal ancestry are on average about three times the length of those found in genomes today,” Stringer said.

This is highly informative, he continued, “as the chunks of Neanderthal DNA have been gradually broken up each generation since the time of interbreeding.”

He and his team charted the rate of that change to the present, when all living non-Africans possess 2 percent Neanderthal in their DNA. Going backwards in time, the researchers could then see that the mating with Neanderthals took place 7,000–10,000 years before the Siberian man lived. This means the human/Neanderthal interbreeding happened no more than 60,000 years ago.

Interesting

WERE NEANDERTHALS EUROPE'S FIRST CAVE ARTISTS?: Paintings on cave walls in Spain are far older than previously thought.

A series of cave paintings in Spain are thousands of years older than scientists realized, raising speculation — but no proof — that Neanderthals could have been the earliest wall artists in Europe.

The oldest image, a large red disk on the wall of El Castillo cave in northern Spain, is more than 40,800 years old, according to an advanced method that uses natural deposits on the surfaces of the paintings to date their creation. The new findings, detailed in the June 15 issue of the journal Science, make the paintings the oldest reliably dated wall paintings ever.

Hmmm....interesting (and be sure to read in the article about human sclerae and the hunt as well)

Humanity's Best Friend: How Dogs May Have Helped Humans Beat the Neanderthals

Yep. Man's best friend, Shipman suggests, might also be humanity's best friend. Dogs might have been the technology that allowed early humans to flourish.

Shipman analyzed the results of excavations of fossilized canid bones -- from Europe, during the time when humans and Neanderthals overlapped. Put together, they furnish some compelling evidence that early humans, first of all, engaged in ritualistic dog worship. Canid skeletons found at a 27,000-year-old site in Předmostí, of the Czech Republic, displayed the poses of early ritual burial. Drill marks in canid teeth found at the same site suggest that early humans used those teeth as jewelry -- and Paleolithic people, Shipman notes, rarely made adornments out of animals they simply used for food. There's also the more outlying fact that, like humans, dogs are rarely depicted in cave art -- a suggestion that cave painters might have regarded dogs not as the game animals they tended to depict, but as fellow-travelers.

Shipman speculates that the affinity between humans and dogs manifested itself mainly in the way that it would go on to do for many more thousands of years: in the hunt. Dogs would help humans to identify their prey; but they would also work, the theory goes, as beasts of burden -- playing the same role for early humans as they played for the Blackfeet and Hidatsa of the American West, who bred large, strong dogs specifically for hauling strapped-on packs. (Paleolithic dogs were large: They had, their skeletons suggest, a body mass of at least 70 pounds and a shoulder height of at least 2 feet -- which would make them, at minimum, the size of a modern-day German shepherd.) Since transporting animal carcasses is an energy-intensive task, getting dogs to do that work would mean that humans could concentrate their energy on more productive endeavors: hunting, gathering, reproducing.

The result, Shipman argues, was a virtuous circle of cooperation -- one in which humans and their canine friends got stronger, together, over time.

It's an interesting theory. I've heard worse. I'm not sure there's any way to truly prove it, though, but it's definitely worth a look at.

The Goddess I worship is associated with dogs (among other things). Although Her origins are rather murky (ostensibly She is Greek) I've often wondered exactly how far back Her influence goes. I believe Her worship to be older than the historical record, although I do not have direct proof.

Anyway, if you have a dog, hug it and be thankful you don't have a brow ridge.

Another mystery apparently solved by DNA

Neanderthals had sex with humans, says DNA: Nine percent of humans everywhere except Africa may be part Neanderthal

Well, it is interesting

Neanderthal ancestors were mostly right-handed: Scientists find evidence in an odd place: front teeth

Humanity's right-hand dominance might be more than 500,000 years old, new research indicates. The trait of right-handedness is commonly believed to be a sign of the development of another uniquely human trait — language.

"We are right-handed because the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and the left side of brain is where language is processed," study researcher David Frayer, of the University of Kansas, told LiveScience. "This is important because it tells us that they were brain lateralized just like we are, and they probably had a language capacity."

Previous studies of ancient humans have shown evidence of handedness in tools, cave art, and bones, but these types of handedness data have been controversial.

Neanderthals may have interbred with early Homo Sapiens

Neanderthal Genome Shows Most Humans Are Cavemen

“There are a lot of aspects of differences between species that can’t be solely obtained from DNA sequence,” said University of Michigan genetic anthropologist Noah Rosenberg, who wasn’t involved in the study. “But at the same time, the DNA sequence is a good place to start.”

Such studies will occupy scientists for years to come. In the meantime, the researchers produced a more immediately stirring result. They compared the Neanderthal genome to genomes of five people from China, France, Papua New Guinea, southern Africa and western Africa. Among non-Africans, between one and four percent of all DNA came from Neanderthals.

On a functional level, the DNA was no different from our own, but bore telltale molecular marks of Neanderthal heritage.

Scientists only found 88 hotspots of differences in our genetic code and that of Neanderthals. When more of the Neanderthal genome is sequenced, those may disappear entirely. But the differences between the species may be more in what genes are turned on or off rather than actual genome variation.

Here's another source, testing the new embeddable tweet process:

A newly-mapped Neanderthal genome provides strong evidence that humans and Neanderthals interbred. http://ow.ly/1HVo1less than a minute ago via HootSuiteDiscovery_News
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