FAMOUS NEANDERTHAL SITES | Facts and Details

NEANDER VALLEY, GERMANY — WHERE NEANDERTHALS DISCOVERED

Neander Valley in Germany

The Neanderthal bones found in 1856 in the Neander Valley in Germany (“thal” is German for valley), 12 kilometers south of Dusseldorf, were the first remains ever found of a prehistoric human ancestor. The remains, found in a limestone mine, consisted of a beetle-browed, low-sloping skullcap, part of a pelvis, and thick-limbed bones. The German workers who found them in a cave thought they belonged to an extinct bear. The first Neanderthal fossil was found in Belgium in 1830 but was not identified as belonging to a Neanderthal until almost a century later.

In 1856, Darwin's Origin of Species had yet to be published and much of the Western world believed that mankind was created by God five days after the heavens and the earth in 4004 B.C.(a date calculated by an Irish theologian). After examining the Neander Valley bones an Irish geologist suggested they may have come from a human ancestor. Most people scoffed at that suggestion. They believed the bones either belonged to a Cossack deserter from the Napoleonic wars, a refugee from Noah's Ark, a village idiot, or a modern human deformed by rickets, arthritis and a blow to the head. When two more Neanderthal skeletons were discovered in Belgian cave in 1886 scientists said that it was unlikely that these men were deformed by the same set of circumstances as the man found in the Neander Valley in 1856. [Source: Michael Lemonick, Time, March 14, 1994]

Franz Lidz wrote in Smithsonian magazine:“Cave bear, thought the quarry foreman who salvaged the specimens and took them to Johann Karl Fuhlrott, a schoolteacher and fossil enthusiast. Fuhlrott sent a cast of the cranium to Hermann Schaaffhausen, a professor of anatomy at the University of Bonn. They agreed that the remains were vestiges of a “primitive member of our race” and together announced the finding in 1857. “The discovery was not well received,” Weniger, the museum director, says. “It contradicted literal interpretations of the Bible, which reigned in the days before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. In scholarly circles, there has been a collective prejudice against Neanderthals. It’s the nature of the profession.” [Source: Franz Lidz, Smithsonian magazine, May 2019]

“Unprepared for the notion of a divergent species, most elite scholars disputed the Neanderthal’s antiquity. The anatomist August Mayer speculated that the specimen had been a rickets-afflicted Cossack cavalryman whose regiment had pursued Napoleon in 1814. The man’s bowed bones, he said, were caused by too much time in the saddle. The pathologist Rudolf Virchow blamed the flattened skull on powerful blows from a heavy object. The thick brow-ridges? The result of perpetual frowning. In 1866 — seven years after the publication of Darwin’s bombshell book — German biologist Ernst Haeckel proposed calling the species Homo stupidus. The name didn’t stick, but the stigma did. “Unfortunately,” concedes Zilhão, “you never get a second chance to make a first impression.”

La Ferrassie

“The caricature of Neanderthals as shambling simians derives largely from a specimen that achieved a degree of fame, if not infamy, as the Old Man of La Chapelle. In 1911, a time when dozens of Neanderthal bones were excavated in southern France, paleontologist Marcellin Boule reconstructed a nearly complete skeleton, found at La Chapelle-aux-Saints. Burdened by the prevailing preconceptions of Neanderthals, his rendering featured chimplike opposable toes, and a head and hips that jutted forward because the poor fellow’s bent spine kept him from standing upright. To Boule, the Old Man’s crooked posture served as a metaphor for a stunted culture. The shape of the skull, he wrote, indicated “the predominance of functions of a purely vegetative or bestial kind.” It wasn’t until 1957 that the Old Man’s dysmorphia was recognized as the byproduct of several deforming injuries and severe osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease. “For Boule, Neanderthals were a side branch of humanity, a dead end in evolution,” says Zilhão. “His crude stereotype went unchallenged until the end of the century.”

Websites on Neanderthals: Neandertals on Trial, from PBS pbs.org/wgbh/nova; The Neanderthal Museum neanderthal.de/en/ ; Hominins and Human Origins: Smithsonian Human Origins Program humanorigins.si.edu ; Institute of Human Origins iho.asu.edu ; Becoming Human University of Arizona site becominghuman.org ; Hall of Human Origins American Museum of Natural History amnh.org/exhibitions ; The Bradshaw Foundation bradshawfoundation.com ; Britannica Human Evolution britannica.com ; Human Evolution handprint.com ; University of California Museum of Anthropology ucmp.berkeley.edu; John Hawks' Anthropology Weblog johnhawks.net/ ; New Scientist: Human Evolution newscientist.com/article-topic/human-evolution

Neanderthal Sites in Spain

There are around 15 Neanderthal sites in Spain in mostly three main areas: 1) in the Cantabrian mountain range, 2) along the eastern Mediterranean coast and 3) in Andalusia.

Discovered in 1907, Gorham’s Cave is a natural sea cave located on the southeastern face of the Rock of Gibraltar. It is the last known place of Neanderthal occupation in the world. Of the total 18 meters of archaeological deposits in the cave, the top 2 meters include Phoenician-Carthaginian (800-300 B.C.) and Neolithic occupations. The remaining 16 meters include Solutrean and Magdalenian deposits and a level of Mousterian stone tools, representing a Neanderthal occupation between 38,000-30,000 years ago. Beneath is a layer of a much earlier occupation dating to 47,000 years ago. [Source: Sci-News.com, Sep 24, 2014]

Neanderthal sites

El Sidrón Cave is a limestone karst cave system located in the Piloña municipality of Asturias, northwestern Spain, where Paleolithic rock art and the fossils of more than a dozen Neanderthals have been found. In the Tunnel of Bones cave 12 Neanderthal specimens dating around 49,000 years ago have been recovered.In 1994, one hundred forty 43,000-year-old Neanderthal bones were found in El Sidorn cave, in an area of upland forests in the Spanish province of Asturias, just south of the Bay of Biscay after some spelunkers noticed two human mandibles jutting out of the soil in a gallery of the cave.

The Sima de los Huesos (“Pit of Bones”) site is northern Spain about 100 feet (30 meters) below the surface at the bottom of a 42-foot (13-meter) vertical shaft. This “Pit of Bones” has yielded fossils of at least 28 individuals, the world's largest collection of human fossils dating from the Middle Pleistocene, about 125,000 to 780,000 years ago, along with remains of cave bears and other animals. The oldest fossils of modern humans found yet date back to about 200,000 years ago. Archaeologists suggest the bones may have been washed down it by rain or floods, or that the bones were even intentionally buried there.

Sima de los Huesos is part of Atapuerca, an anthropological and archaeological in Spain designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2000. According to UNESCO: “The caves of the Sierra de Atapuerca contain a rich fossil record of the earliest human beings in Europe, from nearly one million years ago and extending up to the Common Era. They represent an exceptional reserve of data, the scientific study of which provides priceless information about the appearance and the way of life of these remote human ancestors. [Source: UNESCO World Heritage site website =

La Ferrassie in France

Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in The New Yorker: “One of the largest assemblages of Neanderthal bones ever found—remains from seven individuals—was discovered about a century ago at a spot known as La Ferrassie, in southwestern France. La Ferrassie is in the Dordogne, not far from La Chapelle and within half an hour’s drive of dozens of other important archeological sites, including the painted caves at Lascaux.[Source: Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, August 15, 2011]

“Many thousands of years ago, La Ferrassie was a huge limestone cave, but one of the walls has since fallen in, and now it is open on two sides. A massive ledge of rock juts out about twenty feet off the ground, like half of a vaulted ceiling. The site is ringed by a wire fence and hung with tarps, which give it the aspect of a crime scene.

“The day was hot and dusty. Half a dozen students crouched in a long trench, picking at the dirt with trowels. Along the side of the trench, I could see bits of bone sticking out from the reddish soil. The bones toward the bottom, I was told, had been tossed there by Neanderthals. The bones near the top were the leavings of modern humans, who occupied La Ferrassie once the Neanderthals were gone. The Neanderthal skeletons from the site had long since been removed, but there was still hope that some stray bit, like a tooth, might be found. Each bone fragment that was unearthed, along with every flake of flint and anything else that might even remotely be of interest, was set aside to be taken back to the headquarters to be sorted and tagged.

La Ferrassie vulva

“I tried to imagine what life had been like for the Neanderthals at La Ferrassie. Though the area is now wooded, then it would have been tundra. There would have been elk roaming the valley, and reindeer and wild cattle and mammoths....Later on, back at the barn, I picked through the bits and pieces that had been dug up over the past few days. There were hundreds of fragments of animal bone, each of which had been cleaned and numbered and placed in its own little plastic bag, and hundreds of flakes of flint. Most of the flakes were probably the detritus of toolmaking—the Stone Age equivalent of wood shavings—but some, I learned, were the tools themselves. Once I was shown what to look for, I could see the bevelled edges that the Neanderthals had crafted. One tool in particular stood out: a palm-size flint shaped like a teardrop. In archeological terms, it was a hand axe, though it probably was not used as an axe in the contemporary sense of the word. It had been found near the bottom of the trench, so it was estimated to be about seventy thousand years old. I took it out of its plastic bag and turned it over. It was almost perfectly symmetrical and—to a human eye, at least—quite beautiful. I said that I thought the Neanderthal who had fashioned it must have had a keen sense of design.

“Among the hundreds of thousands of Neanderthal artifacts that have been unearthed, almost none represent unambiguous attempts at art or adornment, and those which have been interpreted this way—for instance, ivory pendants discovered in a cave in central France—are the subject of endless, often abstruse disputes. (Many archeologists believe that the pendants were created by Neanderthals who had come into contact with modern humans and were trying to imitate them, but, relying on the most recent dating techniques, some argue that the pendants were, in fact, created by modern humans.) This paucity has led some to propose that Neanderthals were not capable of art or—what amounts to much the same thing—not interested in it. They simply did not possess what, genomically speaking, might be called the aesthetic mutation.

La Cotte de St Brelade on Jersey Island in the U.K.

La Cotte de St Brelade on the British island of Jersey is one of the most spectacular Neanderthal sites in Europe.Archaeologists have investigated the site at La Cotte de St Brelade since the mid-19th century. More artefacts have been unearthed here than at all the other Neanderthal sites in the British Isles put together. The site is famous for its piles of wooly rhino and mammoth bones. [Source: Ian Sample, The Guardian, February 28, 2014 \^^/]

Ian Sample wrote in The Guardian: “Hundreds of thousands of stone tools and bone fragments have been uncovered at the Jersey site where Neanderthals lived on and off for around 200,000 years. The site was apparently abandoned from time to time when the climate cooled, forcing the Neanderthals back to warmer territory.” The seabed that stretches away from the cliff is one place Neanderthals lived. “The land, now submerged under higher sea levels, was cut with granite ravines, gullies and dead-end valleys – a terrain perfect for stalking and ambushing prey.

Beccy Scott, an archaeologist at the British Museum, told The Guardian: "The site would have been an ideal vantage point for Neanderthal hunters. They could have looked out over the open plain and watched mammoths, woolly rhinos and horses moving around. They could see what was going on, and move out and ambush their prey," said Scott. The exposed coastal site, one of the last resting places of the Neanderthals, was battered by fierce storms in February 2014, raising fears that ancient remains at the site had been destroyed.” \^^/

Why Did Neanderthals Stay at La Cotte de St Brelade For 200,000 Years

There is a record of hominin occupation at the La Cotte site going back to 250,000 years ago. According to the BBC: “At the time Neanderthals were alive, the climate in this part of the world was colder than it is today and the sea level was tens of meters lower. Dr Matt Pope, from the Institute of Archaeology at University College London (UCL), said the area would have been "fantastic for hunting", because of its "dead-end valleys and blind gulleys". “Caves of that scale and size are extremely rare in that landscape," he said, adding: "It seems to be embedded in their routines, coming back to that place for tens of thousands of years." [Source: BBC, February 1, 2021]

Zach Zorich wrote in Archaeology magazine: “Rising out of the English Channel on the island of Jersey is one of the longest-occupied Neanderthal sites in the world. “La Cotte de Saint Brelade is this mega-site, a massive, deeply ravined granite headland on the far corner of northwest Europe providing a record spanning more than 200,000 years,” says Matthew Pope, a geoarchaeologist at University College London. The question that Pope and the Crossing the Threshold project research team is asking is what makes a site like La Cotte a “persistent” place? Why was this location occupied across millennia, even as the environmental conditions changed? There are several possible answers the team is investigating. [Source: Zach Zorich, Archaeology magazine, March-April 2017]

“When Neanderthals lived at the site, between 240,000 and 40,000 years ago, the English Channel was dry land and the granite rock formation may have been an important landmark. According to Pope, around this time, hominins started to use fire regularly, and innovated new tool technologies and hunting practices. This may have pushed Neanderthals to start thinking differently about how they used the resources of the landscapes around them and changed how they thought about the places they called home.

Vindija Cave in Croatia

Vindija Cave, Croatia

Vindija Cave is an archaeological site where numerous Neanderthal and modern human remains have been found. located in the municipality of Donja Voća near n the Croatian village of Krapina, 50 kilometers north of Zagreb in northern Croatia. The remains of 75 Neanderthals were found in Vindija cave. The remains include 874 bones fragments. All these specimens have given scientists a lot of material to work from, which is why we know a lot more about Neanderthals than we do about other species of early man. Three of these Neanderthals were selected as the primary sources for the first draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome project.

It is estimated that Neanderthals used the cave 40,000 years ago; approximately, 8000 years before modern humans lived in that part of Europe. The hominid specimens at level 3G are regarded as unquestionably Neanderthal in overall morphology but exhibit a number of traits that sit closer to anatomically modern Europeans than to the traditional Neanderthal. These include a thinner and less projecting brow ridge, reduced facial size, and narrower front teeth.[4] Though some have put these differences down to the small size of the Vindija individuals, a study conducted in 1995 established that the Vindija Neanderthals, though small, were of comparable size to more morphologically classic Neanderthals such as La Ferassie 2, Shanidar 1 and 4, and Tabun 1. More likely, the Vindija Neanderthals were in transition from the classic robust form to a more gracile one. [Source: Wikipedia +]

The Neanderthal remains at Vindija were found in a Mousterian context; some of the remains occurred in a level with some mixed Aurignacian artefacts.[1] Several of the Neanderthal samples from Vindija also yielded surprisingly late dates when directed dated, yielding dates as late as 28,000–29,000 BP. This led to suggestions that Neanderthals might have survived longer than previously thought and that the Neanderthals at Vindija might have lived concurrently with modern humans. However, later dating methods using more advanced techniques revealed that these earlier dating results were erroneous. The erroneous dates were due to contamination by modern carbon, as minute amounts of modern contamination may result in large errors for very old samples. +

In 2017, researchers from the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit applied a new technique using AMS ultrafiltration based on the extraction of hydroxyproline to directly date several samples from Vindija Cave. Their direct AMS dating results show that the Neanderthal finds at Vindija are older than 44,000 BP. Since this is earlier than the arrival of the first modern humans to the region, the Vindija Neanderthals most likely did not intermix with modern humans.

Neanderthal Remains from Vindija Cave Finds Them Older than Thought

Krapina skull

New dating of Neanderthal remains from Vindija Cave finds them older than thought. Bob Yirka wrote in Phys.org: “An international team of researchers has conducted a new test of Neanderthal remains found at Vindija Cave in Croatia and found them to be older than previous studies indicated. In their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes their dating technique and the possible implications of their findings. [Source: Bob Yirka, Phys.org, September 5, 2017 |||]

“The Neanderthal remains were originally found in the cave approximately 40 years ago and have been tested for age several times. They have also been the subject of much speculation, as it was thought that the remains represented the last of the Neanderthals in that part of Europe and that they existed for a short period of time in close proximity to modern humans. Initial testing suggested the remains were approximately 28,000 to 29,000 years old. More recent tests have put them at 32,000 to 34,000 years old. Both time frames coincide with the arrival of modern humans into the area, keeping alive the theory that the two groups mixed, both physically and socially. But now, using what is being described as a more accurate technique, the group with this new effort has found that the remains are older than thought. |||

“The new technique, called ZooMS involves radiocarbon dating hydroxyproline—an amino acid taken from collagen samples found in bone remains. The team also purified the collagen to remove contaminants. The researchers report that the new technique indicates that the remains—all four samples—were approximately 40,000 years old. This new finding puts the Neanderthal in the cave well before the arrival of modern humans, thus, there could not have been mixing of the two. |||

“The researchers also studied other artifacts from the cave, including other animal bones, and found that the artifacts were a mixed bag, representing a timeline of thousands of years. The animal bones, they found, were from bears. This has led the team to conclude that the reason more modern artifacts were found with older artifacts is because of bears mixing them up. The researchers conclude by claiming their study has shown that the Neanderthals at the Vindija cave did not overlap in time with modern humans, and thus were not the final holdout that many have suggested.” |||

Shanidar Cave in Iraq

Shanidar Cave

Shanidar Cave is an archeological site on the Upper Zab River in the Zargos Mountains or northern Iraq, near the Turkish border and not far from the Iraqi Kurdistan capital, Erbil. The remains of 10 Neanderthal, who lived between 35,000 and 65,000 years ago, have been found there. The Shanidar Neanderthal remains were first discovered in the mid-1950’s by a team from Columbia University. The first nine skeletons were excavated between 1957 and 1961. The tenth skeleton was discovered in 2006 when an archeologist discovered several bones from the collection that did not match the others. Shanidar Cave is noteworthy because it was the first site that shed light on the burial practices and causes of death among Neanderthals. [Source: Kurdish Project]

Four of the six adult Neanderthals found in a cave near Shanidar, Iraq, were deformed by disease and injuries. The skeleton of one badly diseased Neanderthal with no teeth and severe arthritis seems to show that Neanderthals took care of their elders. Another suffered severe injuries but lived to the relatively old age of 45, which shows he was cared for as a member of a group, an early sign of social behavior.

The most interesting of all the skeletons, referred to as Shanidar 1, was carefully excavated and diligently studied because of the damage to his skull and deformities on his leg and arm. It was discovered that the Neanderthal was between the ages 40-50 at the time of his death. The damage to his skull, leg and arm were discovered to have partially healed and were concluded to not have played a role in Shanidar 1’s death. Archeologists believe that Shanidar 1 was taken care of by the other Neanderthals in his social group. It would have been very difficult for him to live long enough for his injuries to partially heal without help from others. At the time, this was a significant discovery, as it lessened the strongly-held belief that Neanderthals were solitary in nature.

Shanidar Cave is sometimes held up as an example that Neanderthal were more spiritually and intellectually advanced the popular image of them suggests. It contains was essentially a small Neanderthal cemetery. One grave contained the body of a 42-year-old man, purportedly sprinkled with flowers. Jon Mooallemjan wrote in the New York Times magazine: “There had been many compelling instances of Neanderthals’ burying their dead, but Shanidar was harder to ignore, especially after soil samples revealed the presence of huge amounts of pollen. This was interpreted as the remains of a funerary floral arrangement. An archaeologist at the center of this work, Ralph Solecki, published a book called “Shanidar: The First Flower People.” It was 1971 the Age of Aquarius. Those flowers, he’d go on to write, proved that Neanderthals “had ‘soul.’ “Then again, Solecki’s idea was eventually discredited. In 1999, a more thorough analysis of the Shanidar grave site found that Neanderthals almost certainly did not leave flowers there. The pollen had been tracked in, thousands of years later, by burrowing, gerbil-like rodents. (That said, even a half-century later, there are still paleoanthropologists at work on this question. It might not have been gerbils; it may have been bees.) [Source: Jon Mooallemjan, New York Times magazine, January 11, 2017]

Shanidar skull

The skeleton of Neanderthal male found at Shanidar had a broken rib that indicated he had been struck in rib and died of a collapsed lung one to three weeks later. Some researchers argued that this was evidence of a man being stabbed to death or being badly beaten up by another Neanderthal, but others say the wounds could just as easily been caused by an accident. That is until Duke anthropologist Steven Churchill published a study in July 2009 that used modern forensic science and determined that the victim, known to scientists as Shanidar 3 after the Iraq site, was most likely killed by a thrown spear. What is perhaps even more remarkable about the finding is that at that time only humans had throwing spears, a technology that makes sense in open grassland of Africa, while Neanderthals used only thrusting spears.

In an experiment Churchill's team aimed to re-create the conditions of Shanidar 3's death using a crossbow, Stone Age projectiles and a pig carcass (pig skin and bones are thought to have the same toughness as Neanderthal skin and bones). When the projectiles were fired at a velocity consistent with that of a thrown spear the punctures left on the pig's ribs resembled those found on the Shanidar 3's ribs. By contrast when the ribs were stabbed with a thrusting spear Churchill found the ribs “were busted al to hell. The high kinetic energy cased a lot of damage on the area." In addition, the angle of entry of Shanidar 3's wound is “consistent with the ballistic trajectory of a thrown weapon."

Denisova Cave in Siberia

Jamie Shreeve wrote in National Geographic: “In the Altay Mountains of southern Siberia, some 200 miles from where Russia touches Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan, nestled under a rock face about 30 yards above a little river called the Anuy, there is a cave called Denisova. It has long attracted visitors. The name comes from that of a hermit, Denis, who is said to have lived there in the 18th century. Long before that, Neolithic and later Turkic pastoralists took shelter in the cave, gathering their herds around them to ride out the Siberian winters. [Source: Jamie Shreeve, National Geographic, July 2013 +]

“In the back of the cave is a small side chamber, and it was there that a young Russian archaeologist named Alexander Tsybankov was digging one day in July 2008, in deposits believed to be 30,000 to 50,000 years old, when he came upon a tiny piece of bone. It was hardly promising: a rough nubbin about the size and shape of a pebble you might shake out of your shoe...The bone preserved just enough anatomy for the paleontologist to identify it as a chip from a primate fingertip—specifically the part that faces the last joint in the pinkie. Since there is no evidence for primates other than humans in Siberia 30,000 to 50,000 years ago—no apes or monkeys—the fossil was presumably from some kind of human. Judging by the incompletely fused joint surface, the human in question had died young, perhaps as young as eight years old. +\

Denisova Cave

“Anatoly Derevianko, leader of the Altay excavations and director of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography in Novosibirsk, thought the bone might belong to a member of our own species, Homo sapiens. Sophisticated artifacts that could only be the work of modern humans, including a beautiful bracelet of polished green stone, had previously been found in the same deposits. But DNA from a fossil found earlier in a nearby cave had proved to be Neanderthal, so it was possible this bone was Neanderthal as well.” +\

“Derevianko decided to cut the bone in two. He sent one half to a genetics laboratory in California; so far he has not heard from that half again. He slipped the other half into an envelope and had it hand-delivered to Svante Pääbo, an evolutionary geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

In the summer of 2010 a human toe bone was found along with an enormous tooth, later linked with the fingertip, from “Layer 11,” in the cave, dated to 30,000 to 50,000 years ago. In Leipzig a graduate student named Susanna Sawyer analyzed its DNA. “To everyone’s shock, the toe bone had turned out to be Neanderthal, deepening the mystery of the place. The green stone bracelet found earlier in Layer 11 had almost surely been made by modern humans. The toe bone was Neanderthal. And the finger bone was something else entirely. One cave, three kinds of human being. “Denisova is magical,” said Svante Pääbo. “It’s the one spot on Earth that we know of where Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans all lived.”

Neanderthal Woman in the Denisovan Cave

Charles Q. Choi wrote in Live Science: “The scientists focused mostly on the fossil's nuclear DNA, the genetic material from the chromosomes in the nucleus of the cell that a person receives from both their mother and father. They also examined the genome of this fossil's mitochondria — the powerhouses of the cell, which possess their own DNA and get passed down solely from the mother.[Source: Charles Q. Choi, Live Science, December 18, 2013 /*]

“The investigators completely sequenced the fossil's nuclear DNA, with each position (or nucleotide) sequenced an average of 50 times. This makes the sequence's quality at least as high as that of genomes sequenced from present-day people. The genetic analysis revealed the toe bone belonged to a Neanderthal. When compared with other Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA samples, this newfound fossil's closest known relatives are Neanderthals found in Mezmaiskaya Cave in the Caucasus Mountains about 2,100 miles (3,380 kilometers) away. /*\

“These findings helped the scientists refine the human family tree, further confirming that different human lineages interbred. They estimated about 1.5 to 2.1 percent of DNA of people outside Africa are Neanderthal in origin, while about 0.2 percent of DNA of mainland Asians and Native Americans is Denisovan in origin. "Admixture seems to be common among human groups," said study lead author Kay Prüfer, a computational geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Prüfer and his colleagues detailed their findings in the Dec. 19 issue of the journal Nature.” /*\

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP and various books and other publications.

Last updated April 2024