and disappeared about 27,000 years ago (ya). During this time, they witnessed some of the coldest climatic conditions ever known in these regions. Many of their physical features suggest that they were adapted for the cold, such as their barrel-shaped chests, shorter limbs...
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How did they sequence the Neanderthal genome? Bone contains DNA that survives long after an animal dies. Over time, though, strands of DNA break up, and microbes with their own DNA invade the bone. Pääbo’s team found ways around both problems with 38,000 and 44,000-year-old bones ...
Population bottlenecks may seem like a scientific term referencing something that happened long ago, but the effects of bottlenecks can be found in every one of us, beginning with Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA and probably including ancestors who survived, or willingly embraced beliefs which in essenc...
A Neanderthal boy of around eight who died almost 50,000 years ago still has things to tell us: mainly that our extinct human relatives grew up at a pace similar to our own. Knowing that can give us clues to Neanderthal social structure, as well as how our hominid cousins raised their ...
As mild climates imperceptibly gave way to long, sharp winters and and summers, people in central Europe 100 000 years ago deliberately selected the animal species that they pursued. Imagine a hunting station at that remote period, situated high over the Danube Valley at a spot now overlooking ...
Furthermore, a key point of his thesis is that Neanderthals, at least some Neanderthals, could and did interbreed with our direct ancestors, the Cro-Magnons. In recent decades it has become apparent that human diversity tens of thousands of years ago was much more complex than previously ...
To learn more about human evolution, Nielsen and his colleagues investigated how Tibetans might have developed their adaptation. Frustratingly, the research team's computer models could not at first explain how Tibetans evolved their pattern of EPAS1 mutations as quickly as they apparently did. ...
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We are admixed, nothing but admixed, all of us.” The earliest documented admixture happened “as soon as humans left Africa and met the Neanderthals”. (A mere decade ago, most scientists assumed we hadn’t mated with them.) Today’s Europeans, who all carry Neanderthal genes, aren’t...