Cro-Magnon people and Neanderthals may have shared their European habitat from 45,000 to 30,000 years ago, but new evidence suggests that they didn’t get more intimate than that. Italian researchers sequenced mitochondrial DNA from Cro-Magnon bones dating from 28,000 years ago and found no trace of Neanderthal DNA, suggesting that the two early hominids did not interbreed to create modern humans.
The fate of the Neanderthals, who vanish from the fossil record around 30,000 years ago, has been fiercely debated. One theory, known as the Out of Africa hypothesis, holds that modern humans, whose ancestors had recently migrated from Africa, drove the Neandertals extinct, possibly through warfare, disease, or cognitive advantage. But the competing multiregional hypothesis argues that Neandertals and modern humans interbred and that Neandertals were absorbed into our gene pool [ScienceNow Daily News].
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Neanderthals don’t have the best reputation. In the public mind, the heavy-browed hominids are thought of as a stupid species that couldn’t compete with brighter Homo sapiens, as the also-rans that therefore went extinct. But a newly discovered trove of Neanderthal tools in Sussex, England may help rehabilitate their image. The tools, which date from the end of the Neanderthal era at around 30,000 B.C., show surprising sophistication, archaeologists say.
“The tools we’ve found at the site are technologically advanced and potentially older than tools in Britain belonging to our own species,” said [University College London]‘s Matthew Pope. “It’s exciting to think that there’s a real possibility these were left by some of the last Neanderthal hunting groups to occupy northern Europe,” he added. “The impression they give is of a population in complete command of both landscape and natural raw materials with a flourishing technology — not a people on the edge of extinction” [Discovery News].
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Woolly mammoths may all look the same in your average natural history museum display — the extinct animals are always depicted with the same curly tusks, shaggy hair, and lumbering feet. But researchers have just discovered that they were not all the same, that two genetically distinct groups of mammoths roamed the Siberian plains many millennia ago, and that one group avoided extinction for an extra 30,000 years.
Researchers first went in search of tufts of mammoth hair that had been frozen in the permafrost. They then used a new technique that allowed them to read the complete DNA sequence of an animal’s mitochondria (an energy-producing organelle within a cell) from a single hair. The DNA in mitochondria is passed only through the mother’s line, and doesn’t give information about changes in gene function, as nuclear DNA can. But it is useful because it doesn’t change from parent to offspring, making it easy to show when different animal groups are present [Nature News].
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