Spiznet
Tue, Aug-01-06, 06:16
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/health/15160633.htm
Love with a certain Neanderthal? It could have happened By
Faye Flam Inquirer Staff Writer
Though it's been 150 years since mysteriously humanlike bones
first turned up in Germany's Neander Valley, the find
continues to shake our collective sense of human identity.
Neanderthals are humanity's closest relatives, with brains at
least as big as ours, and yet we don't know whether we should
include them as members of our own species.
Science no longer considers them our direct ancestors, but
some suspect Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens interbred
during the 20,000-odd years we coexisted in Europe. The
archaeological record doesn't tell us one way or another, but
earlier this month, researchers announced that they would seek
more clues by scraping DNA from Neanderthal bones and teeth.
The question of sex with Neanderthals speaks to our
understanding of ourselves, our origins, and our
uniqueness. If this other type of human being wasn't like
us, what was he like?
As I started researching this issue, I found myself staring at
a picture of a nude Neanderthal man - a forensic sculpture
created by Duke University paleoanthropologist Steve Churchill
that was published last year in the journal Science. The
model, based on a skeleton found at La Ferrassie in France, is
mesmerizing in its combination of familiarity and alienness.
To be honest, he's really not half-bad-looking. I can't say
for certain I wouldn't sleep with him. He's got a good,
muscular body, and while he's nobody's idea of handsome, that
could be forgiven if he had a nice personality or I was
starving and he offered to throw some rhino steaks on the
fire for me.
We're not talking about the stoop-shouldered, hairy, apelike
Neanderthal of popular culture. There's no evidence they were
hairier than modern people, says anthropologist Harold Dibble,
a curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology. For all we know our La Ferrassie
man had a smooth chest and back.
Nor is there any reason to consider Neanderthals more closely
related to chimpanzees than we are. The current scientific
consensus holds that our ancestors and those of Neanderthals
branched off from a common "archaic human" ancestor about
800,000 years ago.
Around half a million years ago the Neanderthal line spread
through Europe and the Middle East, while our dominant
ancestral line didn't move into Europe until much later -
around 45,000 years ago. There, we overlapped until about
28,000 years ago.
The archaeological record suggests Neanderthals knew how to
control fire and created complex tools. "No matter how you cut
it, they were not the Stone Age idiots they were portrayed as
in bad movies," says John Relethford, an anthropologist at the
State University of New York College at Oneonta and author of
Genetics and the Search for Modern Human Origins.
We don't know why Neanderthals became extinct, he says. It
could have been genocide, disease, a change in available food
sources, or absorption into our gene pool through sex. It
didn't have to be anything dramatic, he says. When two groups
are living in the same environment, it takes only a slight
edge for one group to dominate.
Will genetics fill in the story's gaps? That's the hope, says
Michael Egholm of the Connecticut-based 454 Life Sciences.
Getting good information from Neanderthal bones is a long shot
considering that the majority of DNA extracted comes from
bacteria and contamination from people. Still, Egholm says,
the company's technology allows much of this to be sorted out.
But clues also lie within the DNA we're carrying around in our
cells today. Biologist Alan Templeton of Washington University
in St. Louis has found hints that some people of European
ancestry carry genes that emerged in Europe more than 300,000
years ago - far before our main ancestors left Africa.
There's some speculation that genes associated with light skin
and red hair first arose in Neanderthals, for example.
The story Templeton's genetic studies tell is one of
successive waves of humanlike groups moving from Africa to
Europe and Asia, first more than a million years ago, then
800,000 years ago, and finally less than 100,000 years ago.
Each wave of immigrants appears to have mixed with the
previous one already living in Eurasia.
It certainly mirrors what we know of the more recent history
of human migration and exploration. Even when unfamiliar
groups label each other as subhuman, they almost always have
sex anyway.
Love with a certain Neanderthal? It could have happened By
Faye Flam Inquirer Staff Writer
Though it's been 150 years since mysteriously humanlike bones
first turned up in Germany's Neander Valley, the find
continues to shake our collective sense of human identity.
Neanderthals are humanity's closest relatives, with brains at
least as big as ours, and yet we don't know whether we should
include them as members of our own species.
Science no longer considers them our direct ancestors, but
some suspect Neanderthals and modern Homo sapiens interbred
during the 20,000-odd years we coexisted in Europe. The
archaeological record doesn't tell us one way or another, but
earlier this month, researchers announced that they would seek
more clues by scraping DNA from Neanderthal bones and teeth.
The question of sex with Neanderthals speaks to our
understanding of ourselves, our origins, and our
uniqueness. If this other type of human being wasn't like
us, what was he like?
As I started researching this issue, I found myself staring at
a picture of a nude Neanderthal man - a forensic sculpture
created by Duke University paleoanthropologist Steve Churchill
that was published last year in the journal Science. The
model, based on a skeleton found at La Ferrassie in France, is
mesmerizing in its combination of familiarity and alienness.
To be honest, he's really not half-bad-looking. I can't say
for certain I wouldn't sleep with him. He's got a good,
muscular body, and while he's nobody's idea of handsome, that
could be forgiven if he had a nice personality or I was
starving and he offered to throw some rhino steaks on the
fire for me.
We're not talking about the stoop-shouldered, hairy, apelike
Neanderthal of popular culture. There's no evidence they were
hairier than modern people, says anthropologist Harold Dibble,
a curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology. For all we know our La Ferrassie
man had a smooth chest and back.
Nor is there any reason to consider Neanderthals more closely
related to chimpanzees than we are. The current scientific
consensus holds that our ancestors and those of Neanderthals
branched off from a common "archaic human" ancestor about
800,000 years ago.
Around half a million years ago the Neanderthal line spread
through Europe and the Middle East, while our dominant
ancestral line didn't move into Europe until much later -
around 45,000 years ago. There, we overlapped until about
28,000 years ago.
The archaeological record suggests Neanderthals knew how to
control fire and created complex tools. "No matter how you cut
it, they were not the Stone Age idiots they were portrayed as
in bad movies," says John Relethford, an anthropologist at the
State University of New York College at Oneonta and author of
Genetics and the Search for Modern Human Origins.
We don't know why Neanderthals became extinct, he says. It
could have been genocide, disease, a change in available food
sources, or absorption into our gene pool through sex. It
didn't have to be anything dramatic, he says. When two groups
are living in the same environment, it takes only a slight
edge for one group to dominate.
Will genetics fill in the story's gaps? That's the hope, says
Michael Egholm of the Connecticut-based 454 Life Sciences.
Getting good information from Neanderthal bones is a long shot
considering that the majority of DNA extracted comes from
bacteria and contamination from people. Still, Egholm says,
the company's technology allows much of this to be sorted out.
But clues also lie within the DNA we're carrying around in our
cells today. Biologist Alan Templeton of Washington University
in St. Louis has found hints that some people of European
ancestry carry genes that emerged in Europe more than 300,000
years ago - far before our main ancestors left Africa.
There's some speculation that genes associated with light skin
and red hair first arose in Neanderthals, for example.
The story Templeton's genetic studies tell is one of
successive waves of humanlike groups moving from Africa to
Europe and Asia, first more than a million years ago, then
800,000 years ago, and finally less than 100,000 years ago.
Each wave of immigrants appears to have mixed with the
previous one already living in Eurasia.
It certainly mirrors what we know of the more recent history
of human migration and exploration. Even when unfamiliar
groups label each other as subhuman, they almost always have
sex anyway.