Neanderthal

Our closest evolutionary relatives, the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis), were once spread across Europe and as far east as the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia.Yet more than 160 years since the first Neanderthal fossils were unearthed in Europe, little is known about the group size or social organization of Neanderthal communities.Using ancient DNA, a new study provides a snapshot of a Neanderthal community frozen in time.With our colleagues, we show a group of Neanderthals living in the Altai foothills around…

An artist’s illustration of a Neanderthal father and his daughter. Credit: Tom BjorklundAncient genomes of thirteen Neanderthals provide an unprecedented snapshot of their community and social organization.For the first time, scientists have managed to sequence multiple individuals from a remote Neanderthal community in Siberia. Among these thirteen individuals, the investigators identified multiple related individuals, including a father and his teenage daughter. The thirteen genomes also allowed the researchers to…

New research has provided unprecedented insights into the genetics and social structures of Neanderthals. Scientists have sequenced the genomes of 13 individuals that lived in a close-knit community, revealing some specific family ties.Neanderthals are extinct human relatives that lived until about 40,000 years ago, populating much of Eurasia and meeting and mingling with modern humans and other hominins like the Denisovans. Evidence is building about how they lived as a species, but the new study drills down into an…

A Neandertal father and his daughter. Credit: Tom Bjorklund The first Neanderthal draft genome was published in 2010. Since then, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have sequenced a further 18 genomes from 14 different archaeological sites throughout Eurasia. While these genomes have provided insights into the broader strokes of Neanderthal history, we still know little of individual…

Nobel Laureate Svante Pääbo was thrown into a pool of water today for his accomplishment.Photo: Jens Schlueter/Getty Images (Getty Images)The Nobel Assembly today awarded Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research into human origins.Pääbo has been studying ancient DNA since graduate school, when he managed to isolate DNA samples from Egyptian mummies in a German museum. Since then, Pääbo has made his name researching the genetic origins and differentiation of hominin…

Paabo’s research gave rise to an entirely new scientific discipline called paleogenomics, and has “generated new understanding of our evolutionary history", it said. “By revealing genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, his discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human", the Nobel committee said in a statement. The founder and director of the department of genetics at the Max Planck…

Scientists experimenting on mice have found evidence that key parts of the modern human brain take more time to develop than those of our long extinct cousin, the Neanderthal.Like the hare and the tortoise, slow and steady is the winner here. The extra time is caused by protein differences that also appear to reduce chromosome errors, ultimately resulting in a healthier, more robust population.  The study's results imply that this step in the development of our neocortex (the wrinkled outer layer responsible for higher…

New research led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has traced two genetic variants to our Neanderthal relatives that can affect how well drugs are metabolized. It is hypothesized these ancient Neanderthal genes may account for some differences in therapeutic drug activity from person to person.While us Homo sapiens are currently the only species of human inhabiting the Earth, that wasn’t always the case. For hundreds of thousands of years, a whole family of related humans shared the…

Body and mind. Credit: Emiliano Bruner Emiliano Bruner, a paleoneurologist at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), has led a study published in the journal Intelligence on how attention evolved in the human genus, which analyzes the paleontological and archaeological evidence that might shed light on the attentional capacity of extinct hominins.…

Two hundred years ago, an earthquake revealed the entrance to a large cave system in southern Spain; sealed within the dark chambers were artworks made tens of thousands of years ago by early modern humans and Neanderthals, our closest relatives. Now, excavations and scientific analyses have revealed the precise age of many of the cave’s artworks and the chronology of the system’s use.The cave is called Cueva de Ardales, and it contains over 1,000 artworks depicting animals, humans, handprints, and abstractions. Though…