What the Neanderthal could do
These Extinct Elephants Were Neanderthals’ ‘Biggest Calorie Bombs’ – A study of butchered bones from 125,000 years ago offers what researchers call “the first clear-cut evidence of elephant-hunting in human […]
Gene flow, again and again
The Alan Rogers paper which includes ideas of “super-archaics”, is finally out, Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestors interbred with a distantly related hominin. It’s open access, so I encourage you to read it. In it, the authors looking at patterns of derived mutations that vary between populations and try and see which models fit the pattern. I’ve added […]
The details of Eurasian back-migration into Africa
Carl Zimmer has an interesting write-up on the new method to detect Neanderthal ancestry in Africa, Neanderthal Genes Hint at Much Earlier Human Migration From Africa. There are two quotes from researchers that are of note. First, from David Reich: Despite his hesitation over the analysis of African DNA, Dr. Reich said the new findings […]
The state of Neanderthals in early 2019
PNAS has published a paper, Limits of long-term selection against Neandertal introgression. It’s from a preprint which I blogged this summer. What are the major takeaways here? It’s been about 10 years since the draft Neanderthal genome was…
Hominins are still having sex, caught in flagrante delicto
Assuming you haven’t been sleeping under a rock, you have probably heard that a Nature paper came out on an F1 Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid. The major new science in my opinion from the results of the genome itself is to be found in the figure above. It confirms that there was a lot of population turnover among Neanderthals, […]
Neanderthals were human, say it loud and proud
The above tweet captures the essence of something that occasionally happens in science: a revelation that transforms our understanding of the possibilities of the real. 2010’s Neanderthal genome paper did that, transforming a field which was mostly skeptical or cautious of Neanderthal gene flow into modern lineages, to one that was accepting of the likelihood. […]
The Neanderthal-modern human handover
We live in a time of transitions when it comes to Neanderthals. Since the 2010 discovery of strong genomic evidence for Neanderthal ancestry in most humans they’ve been…humanized. This was pretty much inevitable, but, I also think it was right. Neanderthals were a big-brained human species which dominated much of Eurasia for hundreds of thousands […]
The Singing Neanderthal
I’m not sure this is what Steven Mithen had in mind when he wrote The Singing Neanderthals.
Basal humans in our evolutionary closet
The ancient genome from South Africa was of not because it confirmed what many had long suspected: the deep structure of modern humans in Africa goes back quite a bit further than we had been assuming. A few years ago I co-wrote an op-ed for USA Today where I initially wrote that the Khoisan divergence […]
The original Africans are Neandertals (in part)
In antiquity what we term Tunisia and Tripolitania were part of “African province.” Just as “Asia” originally referred to the margins of what we now term Asia (regions of Anatolia), so “Africa” originally denoted a s…
What did red-haired Neanderthals look like?
So asks a commenter below in relation to the question above. First, why would one even presume that they were red-haired, see my 2007 post, or the paper in Science: A Melanocortin 1 Receptor Allele Suggests Varying Pigmentation Among Neanderthals. In …