Tag Archives: neanderthal

Archaeologists have uncovered a 51,000-year-old engraved giant deer phalanx in a cave in the Harz Mountains, Germany. The find, which came from an apparent Middle Paleolithic context that was linked to Neanderthals, demonstrates that conceptual imagination, as a prerequisite to compose individual lines into a coherent design, was present in …

New research led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) shows that Pleistocene cave sediments represent a rich source of ancient DNA that often includes traces of hominin DNA, even at sites where no hominin remains have been discovered. Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia. …

Neanderthals’ cognitive abilities are a hotly debated topic, but a bird bone fragment found at a Middle Paleolithic site in Crimea, Ukraine, features two notches that may have been made by our extinct cousins intentionally to display a visually consistent pattern, according to a new study. The raven bone fragment …

According to a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis, only a very small percentage of Neanderthal DNA is present in the genomes of modern humans because, after interbreeding, natural selection removed large numbers of ‘bad’ Neanderthal gene variants. Reconstruction of a Neanderthal. Image credit: Neanderthal Museum. Neanderthals …