Humans Thrived - Neanderthals Perished

Why did humans take over the world while our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, became extinct? It's possible we were just smarter, but there's surprisingly little evidence that's true.

Neanderthals had big brains, language and sophisticated tools. They made art and jewellery. They were smart, suggesting a curious possibility. Maybe the crucial differences weren't at the individual level, but in our societies.


Two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, Europe and western Asia were Neanderthal lands. Homo sapiens inhabited southern Africa. Estimates vary but perhaps 100,000 years ago, modern humans migrated out of Africa.


Forty thousand years ago Neanderthals disappeared from Asia and Europe, replaced by humans. Their slow, inevitable replacement suggests humans had some advantage, but not what it was.     READ MORE...

Britian's Early Inhabitants

Archaeologists have unearthed 600,000-year-old evidence of Britain’s early inhabitants near Canterbury, England.

The discovery, led by the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge has found evidence of early humans that date from between 560,000 and 620,000 years ago during the Palaeolithic Period.

The site was first identified in the 1920’s when labourers found handaxes in an ancient riverbed, which researchers have now applied modern dating techniques through radiometric dating, infrared-radiofluorescence (IR-RF) dating and controlled excavations of the site.

In a study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the researchers have confirmed the presence of Homo heidelbergensis, an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human which existed during the Middle Pleistocene and an ancestor of Neanderthals. 

Homo heidelbergensis is thought to have descended from the African Homo erectus during the first early expansions of hominins out of Africa beginning roughly 2 million years ago.

Early humans are known to have been present in Britain from as early as 840,000, and potentially 950,000 years ago, but these early visits were fleeting due to cold glacial climatic changes driving populations out of northern Europe which colonised Britain during a warming phase between 560,000 and 620,000 ago. 

During this period, Britain was connected to Europe on the north-western peninsular of the European continent, allowing populations to migrate to new hunting grounds probably during the warmer summer months.  READ MORE...

Changing the World

Neanderthals left an impact on their environment, having cleared part of a forest in Germany either through their fire use or tool production 125,000 years ago.

This is the conclusion of archaeologists led from Leiden University, who studied an archaeological site called Neumark-Nord some 20 miles west of Leipzig.

Evidence from pollen deposits indicates the flora at the lakeside site changed from closed forest to open vegetation for some 2,000 years of Neanderthal occupation.

The findings, the team said, highlight how modern humans are not the first member of the Homo genus to have exerted a significant influence on their environment.

Neanderthals left an impact on their environment, having cleared part of a forest in Germany — either through their fire use or tool production — 125,000 years ago. Pictured: in this documentary reconstructions, Neanderthals by a lake can been seen using fire and tools

This is the conclusion of archaeologists led from Leiden University, who studied an archaeological site called Neumark-Nord (pictured) some 20 miles west of Leipzig

NEANDERTHALS AT NEUMARK-NORD
Evidence of Neanderthal activity at Neumark-Nord was first uncovered in 1985, with the site the subject of numerous excavations since.

The hominins are believed to have occupied the lakeside site year-round for some two millennia.

Finds at the site, Dr Roebroeks told the Wall Street Journal, have included 'tens and thousands of stone artefacts, hundreds of thousands of bone fragments [and] the remains of many hundreds of butchered animals.'

Archaeologists have also uncovered abundant traces of fire usage at the site, including charcoal as well as the burnt remains of seeds and wood.

Despite the Neanderthals' significant impact at Neumark-Nord, the ancient lakeside would have been far from what we might recognise as a village settlement.

In fact, Dr Roebroeks explained, the hominins there may have been less mobile but would have still remained hunter–gathers who travelled from place-to-place during the Last Interglacial period.

During the Eemian period (also known as the 'Last Interglacial' and which spanned from 130,000–115,000 years ago) the area around Leipzig was dotted with small lakes left behind after the retreat of the glaciers from the northern European plain.

The withdrawal of the ice sheets also let hominins return to these lands that they had previously abandoned, with excavations at Neumark-Nord since the mid-1980s having turned up evidence of around 2,000 years' worth of Neanderthal occupation.  READ MORE...

Unknown Ghost Ancestor

Desinova Cave, Russia

Nobody knows who she was, just that she was different: a teenage girl from over 50,000 years ago of such strange uniqueness she looked to be a 'hybrid' ancestor to modern humans that scientists had never seen before.

Only recently, researchers have uncovered evidence she wasn't alone. In a 2019 study analysing the complex mess of humanity's prehistory, scientists used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify an unknown human ancestor species that modern humans encountered – and shared dalliances with – on the long trek out of Africa millennia ago.

"About 80,000 years ago, the so-called Out of Africa occurred, when part of the human population, which already consisted of modern humans, abandoned the African continent and migrated to other continents, giving rise to all the current populations", explained evolutionary biologist Jaume Bertranpetit from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain.

As modern humans forged this path into the landmass of Eurasia, they forged some other things too – breeding with ancient and extinct hominids from other species.

Up until recently, these occasional sexual partners were thought to include Neanderthals and Denisovans, the latter of which were unknown until 2010.

But in this study, a third ex from long ago was isolated in Eurasian DNA, thanks to deep learning algorithms sifting through a complex mass of ancient and modern human genetic code.

Using a statistical technique called Bayesian inference, the researchers found evidence of what they call a "third introgression" – a 'ghost' archaic population that modern humans interbred with during the African exodus.

"This population is either related to the Neanderthal-Denisova clade or diverged early from the Denisova lineage," the researchers wrote in their paper, meaning that it's possible this third population in humanity's sexual history was possibly a mix themselves of Neanderthals and Denisovans.  READ MORE...