#palaeoanthropology

[corin-tuckers-left-one]

If you think about it humans are just hideously mutated Australopithecus. Like, if they saw animals that were roughly the same shape as them but without the prognathism and semi-opposable big toe and with chins and huge heads I think they'd be pretty freaked out. Like if humans saw the aliens from Mars Attacks.

[cha-mij]

Since I like to do the book equivalent of neurodivergents having three drinks at a go I'm currently reading:

After the Ice: A Global History 20,000-5000 BC by Steven Mithen

A Well Gardened Mind: Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World by Sue Stuart-Smith

The Last Witch of Edinburgh by Marielle Thompson

and if yes pls respond/put in the tags with what you’re reading and whether or not you like it i need new books for the new year <3

[jonescrysstal]

Some Remarks about the Influences of Astronomical Phenomena on Islamic Architecture “Analytical and Applied Study on Selected Religious Architectural Models in Cairo”

In researching for areas of Islamic architecture and Heritage structures, it can be noticed that they included numbers of scientific applied manifestations and astronomical phenomena. One of these architectural manifestations is the astronomical phenomena that have not been discussed deeply and have not been concentrated and strongly investigated by researchers . This study seeks to discuss the extent of effect of astronomical phenomena on Islamic architecture that include a vast layout of architectural styles and structural designs which were varied from one structure to other building through the different Islamic ages. The main Islamic architectural models include religious, funeral, civil, urban and military architectures such as Mosques, Mausoleums, Khanqahs, Zawiyas, Madrassas, Palaces, Turrets or Towers, Castles and Fortresses, in addition to domestic architecture that includes the public baths or the so-called Hammams, Fountains, Sabils and Kuttabs.

Read more about this article:

https://lupinepublishers.com/anthropological-and-archaeological-sciences/fulltext/some-remarks-about-the-influences-of-astronomical-phenomena-on-islamic-architecture-analytical-and-applied-study-on-selected-religious-architectural-models-in-cairo.ID.000131.php

Read more  Lupine Publishers Google Scholar articles: https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&hl=en&user=w-I2_wEAAAAJ&cstart=20&pagesize=80&citation_for_view=w-I2_wEAAAAJ:ye4kPcJQO24C

[jordicasamitjanaethicalvegan]

Are you still one of those people who believe that our ancestors were carnivores? If not, how many arguments do you know that debunk this theory? Are you aware of all the alternative hypotheses that exist to the explanations that used to be given to justify this myth?

In this article, I lay out 10 hypotheses that help to support the notion that early humans had a predominately plant-based diet.

[atheostic]

Evolution revolution: how a Cape Town museum exhibit is rewriting the story of humankind

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Paula Wright

Published: Feb 19, 2023

If any man could draw up a comprehensive, infallible guide to navigating this treacherous territory, we would certainly erect a statue to his everlasting memory. There is a Twitter account dedicated to exploring and enumerating precisely the distinctions and differences between the acceptably erotic and the intolerably sexist. It’s called @SexyIsntSexist. It is, of course, under the control of a woman.” Neil Lyndon. Do men really understand what sexism is? The Telegraph 20/5/14

I created Darwinian Gender Studies (DGS) in 2008 as a cross-disciplinary area of study and research which utilises insights across the evolutionary behavioural sciences, including but not limited to, evolutionary psychology, biology, anthropology, ethology, palaeoanthropology and cultural evolution.    It represents the consilience of the natural and social sciences, as envisioned by E. O. Wilson.

Back then, my planned PhD thesis was to be in developing an evolutionary, bio-cultural model of ‘patriarchy’ which challenged the premises of the feminist conception of patriarchy. Even in 2008, the project foresaw that political correctness, social justice and toxic feminism were taking us deep down the postmodern rabbit hole. My goal was to build bridges of understanding between the sexes not walls of fear and mistrust, which is what feminism does today. To learn about humans and humanity; what we are, and what we are not.

Two things we are, which we cannot cease to be and remain human, are a sexually reproducing, moderately sexually dimorphic, pair-bonded species. These are basic facts of our human nature which cannot be erased by social engineering.

Within DGS, I interrogate orthodox feminist concepts, such as patriarchy theory, objectification theory, gender, power, mating strategies, and sex differences and similarities, using humour and evolutionary explanatory models such as natural and sexual selection, parental investment theory, female choice, signalling theory, life history theory, intersexual competition and intrasexual competition.

History has demonstrated many times, that whenever our species attempts to take control of biology and bend it out of shape to ideological goals, human tragedy always follows. It’s a lesson we still don’t seem to have learned, as in spite of overwhelming evidence, many people still hold fast to the idea of an endlessly flexible human nature, and indeed, human nature is flexible, but a blank slate it is not. Neither however is it a crude caricature of immutable deterministic drives and instincts as often painted within the straw man of biological determinism. Human nature is very much mutable, but not infinitely or arbitrarily so, and here lies the nub: Within what may seem like infinite variations of human action and reaction to what life throws at us, our predispositions on an average scale are actually predictable. There are enough constants within this calculus to recognise the existence of an unmistakably human nature. This nature will vary and recalibrate between individuals and ecologies (variation is one of the engines of evolution) but these variations dance around a constant, evolutionary fire.

“Those who journey from political correctness to truth often risk public disapprobation, but it is notable that most never lose their tolerance or humanity. They may question the politics of race, but not that racism is bad; they may question campaigns about women’s pay, but not that women and men deserve equality of treatment.” Browne, A. (2006) The Retreat of Reason: Political correctness and the corruption of political debate in modern Britain. Civitas

I was, and am, standing on the shoulders of many female evolutionary scientists and philosophers who came before me such as Barbara Smuts, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Anne Campbell, Helena Cronin, Griet Vandermassen, Catherine Salmon, Maryanne Fisher, Bobby Low, Helen Fisher, and many more. Over the last 50 years, their scholarship has revealed that, far from feminist fears to the contrary, evolved sex differences do not equate to inferiority.  Via evolution, we in fact see true equality expressed in discrete and fascinating ways.

These women (and many men) have illuminated the role females play as potent agents of evolution via the phenomenon of female choice. This is sadly still an unsung revolution – unsung by feminism, not evolutionists –  as it shattered the male perspective biases that once dominated biology and Darwinism. These women did this, not with rhetorical declarations of war against ‘patriarchy’ but with logic and critical thinking.

When it comes to the principles of natural selection – the struggle to survive – men and women differ very little. Rather, it is in the principles of sexual selection – the struggle not just to survive but thrive enough to have offspring and allow them to thrive also – that the main differences start to become manifest. It is a categorical fact that none of these differences equates to any moral inferiority. No genuine evolutionary scholar would ever make such a claim.

Feminists have long claimed that logic is an exclusively male trait. So much so that to counter the “male” scientific method they felt the need to create “female” method – social constructionism - which ironically invokes every negative female stereotype they claim to want to refute. They did this not because social constructivism was a better tool – it is untested – but because it was the binary opposite of the scientific method.

Women, in fact, have nothing to fear from logic. Yet feminists do fear it, as philosopher Janet Radciffe Richards notes in her book The Sceptical Feminist, 

“…in spite of girls doing better at school than boys, feminists are still woeful at rationality…feminism has some tendency to get stuck in the quagmire of unreason from time to time [but] it cannot be denied that adopting an anti-rational stance has its uses; it can be turned into an all-purpose escape route from tricky corners”  

They also fear it because it falsifies the very premises feminism rests on – especially female inferiority.

This is a description of all feminisms today: radical, intersectional and all other tribes battling for dominance in the victim narrative – including ideological men’s rights, MGTOW and “red pill” groups. All feminisms eschew logic and reason for dogma and ideology and all are in thrall to the flying patriarchal spaghetti monster in the sky. Ask a question about female oppression, you already know the answer: it’s the patriarchy, stupid. And ideological men’s groups have their own version of patriarchy, known as gynocentrism. Both concepts are intellectually myopic.

I created DGS all those years ago because I wanted the opportunity to have a role, however small, in helping us better understand ourselves as a species.

It is true that as a woman I am perhaps more interested in the unique selection pressures women face due directly to their sex. As an evolutionist and a realist, however, this bias does not make me blind to the fact that men face their own unique selection pressures due explicitly to their sex.

The truth is, one sex cannot be understood except in the light of the other. Men and women have co-evolved, each shaping the other both physically and psychologically via sexual selection. Men desire power and resources because women desire men who have power and resources. And female conflict, well that doesn’t look like male conflict, and so often goes unseen, especially by feminists.

From an evolutionary perspective, feminism can be categorised as the study of the conflict between the sexes – intersexual conflict – aka the “battle of the sexes” with a particular interest in proximate, conscious mechanisms of how men can oppress women and how this oppression can be countered. But this is only half the story. Evolutionists posit that to really understand intersexual conflict one must also analyse intrasexual conflict. We do this because we observe across species that competition within a sex is always far more intense than between the sexes. An evolutionary lens also broadens the enquiry to include an analysis of ultimate, unconscious mechanisms of not just how, but why, men pursue the goal of power and resource control. What do men want to do with power? To create strong alliances, subdue rivals, protect against enemies and attract mates.  

Much is known about male intrasexual competition. We have had 2000 years to work it out – its role in shaping cultures and empires – for better or worse. Far less is known about conflict - and conflict resolution - between women; female intrasexual competition (FIC). It is the pink elephant in the feminist room. Do we have the same amount of time to understand female intrasexual competition? For better or worse? I don’t think we do. The epidemic of female-on-female bullying in nursing has long been acknowledged in academia, yet nothing is done about it. In the UK it costs the NHS billions of pounds in workplace attrition, sick leave and low efficiency. It can also cost lives, as a “culture of bullying” was highlighted in the official reports on two scandals in UK maternity wards where both infants and mothers lost their lives.

In another example observe the rise of intragender conflict in the West. Third-gender people exist in many cultures, but only in the West are males who identify with the female gender trying to use it as leverage to get access to sex-based rights and privileges. Then we have feminism itself a battleground fraught with female intrasexual competition, which is often mistakenly called “internalised misogyny”.  Women too, it seems, want to create alliances, subdue rivals and attract the best mates.

Using FIC as a lens to look anew at hot feminist topics such as the beauty industry, cosmetic surgery, anorexia, and the endless wars of attrition between the many tribes of feminisms brings fascinating new insights, as all these phenomena seem to be expressions of female competition not male oppression.

Nonetheless, there is still a comfortable consensus among all feminists that the beauty ‘ideal’ is a tyranny perpetrated upon women by the patriarchy. “Feminists down the ages have argued that the oppression of women is played out on their bodies, their clothes, their style of adornment. To politicise dress has been one of the enduring projects of the women’s movement.” (Walter, N. 1999) Naomi Wolf tackled this concept in her seminal book The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. It suggested that this patriarchal strategy is one of ‘divide and rule’ as it “creates a climate of competitiveness among women that divides them from each other.”

Competitiveness is the keyword here. Perhaps the idea of sanctioning the idea, nay the fact, of female intrasexual competition seems frightening for feminists because on the surface of it, it threatens the very notion of a ‘sisterhood’. Yet we know that men are murderously competitive with one another, as homicide rates attest, and this does not seem to threaten their notion of ‘the patriarchy’.

The evidence actually shows that the beauty myth may not be a tyranny perpetuated on women by men, but on one other - if it is a tyranny at all! And it reveals a much more complex and fascinating picture of female agency which goes far to liberate women from the doctrine of passive femininity.

The fact is, women are fiercely competitive with one another, but as the existence of feminism attests, this does not stop women at least trying to cooperate to face challenges, though, as feminism also shows, its own willful ignorance of human nature means feminists cannot agree on anything for long. This explains the many tribes within feminism, and the fiercely defended hierarchies that exist within feminism itself.

I do not deny that these revelations are tricky for feminists to negotiate, but that is no reason for not taking them on. That female intrasexual competition exists is not in doubt. The degree of it however will vary from culture to culture. We know dominance hierarchies exist in many species and all apes. Humans add to the mix competence hierarchies which allow for the utilisation of innate talents and the division of labour which has allowed our species to become far more than the sum of its biologically determined parts.

We also know females have a large role in the construction and maintenance of such hierarchies, for better and worse. Women are individuals and as such are often not united in their interests. An individual’s environment is crucial to how they calibrate their own needs. Yet, ironically, the collective structure of feminism, suppresses the evolutionary mechanism of individual female choice. The epithet “choice feminism” is regarded with contempt by most feminists today.

 “If we do not know what we are capable of…then we do not know what to watch out for, which human propensities to encourage, and which to guard against.” Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.

Further reading: Griet Vandermassen Sexual Selection: A Tale of Male Bias and Feminist Denial ; Griet Vandermassen: Who’s Afraid of Charles Darwin: Debating Feminism and Evolutionary Theory; Anne Campbell: A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women ; Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding ; Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Mothernature ; Susan Pinker: The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Real Gender Gap ; Christina Hoff Sommers: Who Stole Feminism? ; Cindy Metson & David Buss: Why Women Have Sex; Women reveal the truth about their sex lives, from adventure to revenge (and everything in between) ; E.O. Wilson: Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge ; Jerome H.Barklow (ed): Missing the Revolution: Darwinism for Social Scientists

==

We recognize that the evolution of peafowl, bees, seahorses, angler fishes and marsupial mice has resulted in males and females whose physiology and behavior development has influenced and responded to each other. Yet somehow, that female and male humans behave as they do as a result of the other is somehow unreasonable or even "sexist." Like creationist Xians, this is a denial of evolution and of humans as members of the animal kingdom.

It seems like the "god did it" dragon of "tHe PaTrIaRcHy," then, was conjured to fill the gap in the combination of denial of biological sex-based differences (directly responsible for the formulation of gender ideology; and itself a denial of evolution), and denial of intrasexual competition between women ("On Twitter, women are more misogynistic than men") in order to obscure female agency.

If "gender studies" had been based on science instead of Marxian psychosis and postmodern fantasy, it might well have been harder for the Queer Theorists to find a solid ideological foothold and enthusiastic collaborators.

[mythbringer-mayhem]

Word of day (14)

palaeoanthropology 👏

[littleminxofspades]

I’ve never understood the “sex makes us human” thing. Do you think other animals don’t have sex?

“sex/romance/empathy makes us human,” they say. awful. pathetic. what makes us human is the urge to set things on fire

[corin-tuckers-left-one]

Incomprehensible. Thank you 🙏

[linguistlist-blog]

Books: Rhaeti&Co. Nuovi scenari sulla questione tirrenica. New scenarios on the Tyrrhenian issue : Marchesini (ed.) (2024)

As a result of the identification of a new language belonging to the Tyrrhenian language family, Rhaetic, in the last 30 years and the focus on the three languages of this language family in several publications, a renewed interest in the relationships between the peoples of central and northern Italy and the northern Aegean has arisen and been analysed anew. In this anthology, authors from various disciplines present their views on the Tyrrhenian question: Linguistics, palaeoanthropology, archa http://dlvr.it/TGbngs

[foggynightdonut]

Nubian Levallois technology associated with southernmost Neanderthals

Alternate occupations of the Levant by Neanderthal and Homo sapiens populations

Neanderthals occurred widely across north Eurasian landscapes, but between ~ 70 and 50 thousand years ago (ka) they expanded southwards into the Levant, which had previously been inhabited by Homo sapiens. Palaeoanthropological research in the first half of the twentieth century demonstrated alternate occupations of the Levant by Neanderthal and Homo sapiens populations, yet key early findings have largely been overlooked in later studies. Here, we present the results of new examinations of both the fossil and archaeological collections from Shukbah Cave, located in the Palestinian West Bank, presenting new quantitative analyses of a hominin lower first molar and associated stone tool assemblage. The hominin tooth shows clear Neanderthal affinities, making it the southernmost known fossil specimen of this population/species. The associated Middle Palaeolithic stone tool assemblage is dominated by Levallois reduction methods, including the presence of Nubian Levallois points and cores. This is the first direct association between Neanderthals and Nubian Levallois technology, demonstrating that this stone tool technology should not be considered an exclusive marker of Homo sapiens.

In the Late Pleistocene, Homo sapiens occupied the Levant during Marine Isotope Stage 5 (MIS 5: 130–71 ka) 11,12,13 then are next documented in the region from ~ 50 ka onwards 14,15. With the onset of cooler conditions at the start of MIS 4 (71–59 ka) 16,17,18,19 fossils of Neanderthal populations have consistently been recovered from the wooded landscapes of the eastern Mediterranean coast associated with late Middle Palaeolithic assemblages 20,21,22 (Fig. 1).

Earlier evidence for the Neanderthal occupations of the region remain mired in controversy, such as the dating and provenance of Tabun C123,24. Following MIS 5, therefore, a substantive change in hominin demography can be observed in the Levant, with an expansion of Neanderthals from their northern distribution into regions previously occupied by Homo sapiens.

svdsmw

[nochd]

There were multiple hominin migrations from Africa into the Middle East throughout human prehistory -- at least four if I recall correctly. One theory I once remember hearing (but haven't seen again since, so take it with a grain of salt) is called "The Sahara Desert as a Pump".

We know from various lines of evidence that large parts of what's now the Sahara have, during the last half million years, repeatedly become green and fertile over a few thousand years and then returned to desert again. Each time those places greened up, people moved into them; when they turned back to desert, people moved out. And the people who were closer to the northeastern edge moved out, not southward back to where their ancestors millennia before had come from, but northwards into Eurasia.

What do you think about the evolution theory of everyone getting out of Africa? For me it is very problematic to think that people do not want to stay in Africa and prefer to go to "civilized" places. While we're here, what do you think of the "first world" and "third world" division. If we were to follow those standards technically the UK is kinda a.third world country at this specific moment. Have a great day

The 'out of Africa' is just the theory that hominins evolved in Africa first and then migrated - likely following fresh water sources. Nowhere was "civilised" then - it was prehistory! I don't think it's problematic and it is, in fact, a fact.

[warningsine]

When did humans first begin to speak, which speech sounds were uttered first, and when did language evolve from those humble beginnings? These questions have long fascinated people, especially in tracing the evolution of modern humans and what makes us different from other animals. George Poulos has spent most of his academic career researching the phonetic and linguistic structures of African languages. In his latest book, On the Origins of Human Speech and Language, he proposes new timelines for the origins of language. We asked him about his findings.

When and where did human speech evolve?

Research carried out for this study indicates that the first speech sounds were uttered about 70,000 years ago, and not hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago, as is sometimes claimed in the literature.

While my research has been primarily based on phonetic (speech sounds) and linguistic (language) analyses, it has also taken into account other disciplines, like palaeoanthropology (the study of human evolution), archaeology (analysing fossils and other remains), anatomy (the body) and genetics (the study of genes).

The transformation of Homo sapiens (modern humans) from a “non-speaking” to a “speaking” species happened at about the same time as our hunter-gatherer ancestors migrated out of Africa.

When those early adventurers migrated beyond the African continent, they took with them the greatest gift ever acquired by our species – the ability to produce speech sounds, enabled by the creation of a “speech” gene. It was that ability, more than anything else, that catapulted them into a world in which they would dominate all other species.

Which speech sounds were first uttered?

The very first speech sounds ever produced were not just random involuntary sounds. Underlying these speech sounds was a fledgling network that connected certain areas of the brain to different parts of the vocal tract. Various anatomical and environmental factors contributed to Homo sapiens’ ability to produce speech sounds for the first time ever.

Another interesting factor was an apparent change in the diet of our early ancestors and the possible effect it might have had on the human brain. The change to what was essentially a marine diet rich in omega 3 fatty acids occurred when those early humans migrated from the interior to the coastlines of the continent.

The vocal tract developed gradually over a long period, and the different stages in its development determined the types of sounds that could be produced. At the time of the “out of Africa” migration, the only part of the vocal tract that was physiologically developed to produce speech sounds was the oral cavity (mouth area).

The only speech sound that could be produced entirely in the mouth at the time was the so-called “click” sound. The airstream could be controlled within the mouth. Clicks are the only known speech sounds that behave in this manner. They still occur today in a few African languages – predominantly in the Khoisan languages spoken in parts of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa.

Clicks occur in less than 1% of the languages of the world. They also occur in a few isolated instances in East Africa and in certain languages of South Africa that adopted the clicks when they came into contact with the Khoisan. Clicks have also been noted in one instance outside the African continent, in an extinct ceremonial language register known as Damin in Australia.

An example of a click speech sound is the so-called “kiss” (or bilabial) click where the lips are brought together, and the back part of the tongue is raised against the back of the mouth. The lips are then sucked slightly inwards, and when released a click sound is produced.

My research suggests that the “kiss” click was probably the first speech sound ever produced by Homo sapiens. As time moved on, the various parts of the tongue became more and more manoeuvrable, making it possible for other click sounds to be produced in the mouth as well.

So, when did the other speech sounds evolve?

This study demonstrates that the production of all the other human speech sounds (the other consonants, as well as all the vowels) began to take place from approximately 50,000 years ago. This was dependent on the gradual development of a well-proportioned vocal tract which included the mouth, the area behind the mouth (the pharynx), the nasal passages, and the all-important larynx with its vocal cords. Three airstream mechanisms evolved for the production of all speech sounds, and they evolved gradually in successive stages.

How did humans communicate before clicks?

Before this, the only sounds humans could produce were the so-called “vocalisations” or vocal calls. Those were imitations or mimics of various actions or sounds that humans were exposed to in their environment.

They may have also been involuntary sounds which expressed various emotions or the involuntary sounds made when yawning, sneezing etcetera. These must not be confused with the very intricate mechanisms that are involved in the production of the speech sounds which form the foundations of what we recognise today as human language.

And the use of full grammatical language?

As the different speech sounds evolved, they combined in various ways to form syllables and words. And these in turn combined with each other in different ways to generate the structural types of grammatical sentences that characterise modern languages.

The initial ability to produce speech sounds was the spark that led to the gradual evolution of language. Grammatical language did not evolve overnight. There was no “single silver bullet” that generated language.

The indication is that human language was a fairly late acquisition of Homo sapiens. It is argued in this study that language, as we know it today, probably began to emerge about 20,000 years ago.

We observed earlier that the first speech sounds were uttered by the ancestors of the speakers of present-day Khoisan languages. In the light of this observation, it would be reasonable to assume that they had a head start in being the first to speak a grammatical language as well.

To date there is no substantial phonetic or linguistic evidence to indicate that other species such as the Neanderthals could have ever spoken a grammatical language. They did not have the required vocal tract dimensions for speech sound production, let alone the morphological and syntactic structures that were required for grammatical language.

Why does this all matter?

The utterance of the very first speech sounds about 70,000 years ago was the beginning of a journey that was to lead to the evolution of human language.

Language has provided the medium of communication that has played a pivotal role in the momentous developments that have taken place from the earliest known “written” records that we have access to (some 5,500 years ago), to the highly sophisticated technological advances that we are witnessing today.

[xtruss]

Sex, Not Violence, Could’ve Sealed the Fate of the Neanderthals

More evidence emerges that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens made love and not war thousands of years ago.

— By Laura Baisas | Published November 2, 2022 | Science — Archaeology

Neanderthal skulls on display at London's Natural History Museum. Deposit Photos

The species Homo sapiens (or “wise man”) began to evolve about 300,000 years ago, and eventually won out the evolutionary battle and became the only Homo species to reign on Earth about 40,000 years ago. During the early days of human life, another species named Homo neanderthalensis, or more commonly called Neanderthals, co-existed with Homo sapiens. In 2010, a ground-breaking analysis of a Neanderthal genome revealed that the two species could successfully interbreed.

It was once thought that war and violence caused the demise of the Neanderthals. However, a new study out this week in the journal PalaeoAnthropology adds to a growing body of research that proposes that Homo sapiens may have been responsible for the extinction of Neanderthals in a different manner—sex.

The researchers compared the genomes of Neanderthals and present day humans, and discovered that breeding in between the two species could have led to the eventual extinction of Neanderthals. When looking closer at the genomes of a Neanderthal with five modern humans, researchers discovered that Asians and Europeans share roughly one to four percent of their DNA with Neanderthals, while Africans don’t share any. This suggests that modern humans bred with Neanderthals after they left the African continent, but before they spread East to Asia and north towards Europe roughly 250,000 years ago.

However, there currently isn’t any evidence of Homo sapiens genetics in late Neanderthal genomes dating to between 40,000 to 60,000 years ago. Only 32 Neanderthal genomes have been sequenced, which makes it possible that a lack of Homo sapiens DNA within the Neanderthal genome is simply due to a low sampling.

It is also possible this is due to hybridization—where one species starts mating with another, creating offspring of a new variety. There are plenty of examples of hybrids in nature, such as the liger, which is the offspring of a male lion and a female tiger, or a mule, which is the offspring of a horse and donkey. For some species combinations, it makes a difference which parent is from which species, and often the offspring are infertile.

The lack of mitochondrial DNA (inherited from mother to child) from Neanderthals present in living humans might be evidence that only male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens could successfully mate. If the researchers’ theory is correct, fewer Neanderthals may have been breeding with one another, opting for interspecies mating. This would decimate populations of the already existing small and scattered groups of Neanderthal families, eventually pushing them towards decline.

“We don’t know if the apparent one-way gene flow is because it simply wasn’t happening, that the breeding was taking place but was unsuccessful, or if the Neanderthal genomes we have are unrepresentative,” said Chris Stringer, the Research Leader in Human Evolution at London’s Natural History Museum and study author, in a statement. “As more Neanderthal genomes are sequenced, we should be able to see whether any nuclear DNA from Homo sapiens was passed on to Neanderthals and demonstrate whether or not this idea is accurate.”

“Our knowledge of the interaction between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals has got more complex in the last few years, but it’s still rare to see scientific discussion of how the interbreeding between the groups actually happened,” added Stringer. “We propose that this behavior could have led to the Neanderthals’ extinction if they were regularly breeding with Homo sapiens, which could have eroded their population until they disappeared.”

Around 600,000 years ago, Homo sapiens and Neanderthals diverged from each other and evolved in very different parts of the world. Neanderthal fossils have been found in Asia and Europe, with some as far from Africa and southern Siberia.

Meanwhile, Homo sapiens evolved in Africa, but scientists are uncertain whether our ancestors are the direct descendants of one specific group of ancient African hominins or came about as the result of mixing between different groups spread across the continent.

[palaeolithicc]

Homo sapiens (derogatory)