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Fifty thousand years ago, a Neandertal relieved himself in a cave in present-day Belgium, depositing, among other things, a sample of his DNA. The urine clung to minerals in the soil and the faeces eventually decomposed. But traces of the DNA remained, embedded in the cave floor, where earth falling from the cave's ceiling and blowing in from outside eventually entombed it. Now, researchers have shown they can find and identify such genetic traces of both Neandertals and Denisovans, another type of archaic human, enabling them to test for the presence of ancient humans even in sites where no bones have been found.
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Neanderthal DNA Recovered from Cave Soil
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If little else, the brain is an educational toy.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28 2017, @02:43PM (4 children)
I would love to be able to go back in time and meet a neandertal tribe.
Unless I'm mistaken, the neandertals had a larger cranial capacity [wikipedia.org]. While that's not a predictor of intelligence in general, they may have been at least as "smart" as humans:
Neanderthals are known for their large cranial capacity, which at 1,600 cm3 (98 cu in) is larger on average than that of modern humans. One study has found that Neanderthal brains were more asymmetric than other hominid brains. In 2008, a group of scientists produced a study using three-dimensional computer-assisted reconstructions of Neanderthal infants based on fossils found in Russia and Syria. It indicated that Neanderthal and modern human brains were the same size at birth, but that by adulthood, the Neanderthal brain was larger than the modern human brain. They had almost the same degree of encephalization (i.e. brain to body size ratio) as modern humans.
I wonder if neandertals were less warlike than humans and if that's why they died out. It's a shame that no neandertal populations survived.
Reading through this article [wikipedia.org] gives the impression that they were less technologically adaptable, however.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday April 28 2017, @02:49PM (1 child)
I bet you'd have sex with one too, it seems you have a fetish.
You want to make one go "OOgaBoogaBooga....OOOOGGAAAAAAABoogaBoogaBoogaBooga!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28 2017, @06:32PM
It probably runs in the ancestral line. After all, being of northern European heritage, it's possible that my ancestors did just that if the studies identifying neandertal genetics in modern humans are to be believed.
What if instead of looking ape-like as neandertals are commonly depicted, they instead looked Scandinavian, say?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28 2017, @06:40PM
Maybe they rejected pursuit of technology as not sustainable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29 2017, @12:58AM
Neanderthals were less social.
Sharing wasn't their thing.
There is clearly a genetic line that includes Neanderthals and Right Wingers.
One hopes that extinction is also part of that modern-day picture.
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