Neanderthals died out earlier than originally believed

[Ichingcarpenter]

(PhysOrg.com) -- According to a newly released report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a newly refined method of radiocarbon dating has found that Neanderthals died off much earlier than originally believed. Where previous testing had shown fossils as young as 29,000 years ago, this new method puts the date closer to 39,000 years ago, sparking the debate that Neanderthals and modern humans probably never interacted in Europe.


http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-05-neanderthals-died-earlier-believed.html

[Ichingcarpenter]

1. More from another site

The finding, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may revise the present Neanderthal timeline. It's commonly believed that Neanderthals from what is now Russia died out around 30,000 years ago. The latest discovery could push back the Neanderthal extinction, at least for this region, to 39,700 years ago, which was the age of the infant's fossil.

http://news.discovery.com/human/neanderthals-may-have-died-out-earlier-than-thought-110509.html

[aquart]

2. Oh, dear. They think homo sapiens weren't in Europe 39,000 years ago?

Anthropologists always believe six impossible things before breakfast.

[greyl]

3. Where you getting that? Article mentions co-existing 100,000 years ago. nt

[Ichingcarpenter]

4. Cro Magum migration

You can click on the maps.....http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cro-Magnon#cite_note-Currat-19

However does the new carbon dating effect cro magnum also?

[greyl]

5. 100,000 years was about Asia, not Europe. I'm such an ape. nt

[Jim__]

6. Does anyone know how he draws this conclusion for all of Europe?

According to the abstract, they've only tested one fossil from the northern Caucasas. They have a Bayesian model that implies this should hold for fossils throughout Western Eurasaia:

Abstract
Advances in direct radiocarbon dating of Neanderthal and anatomically modern human (AMH) fossils and the development of archaeostratigraphic chronologies now allow refined regional models for Neanderthal–AMH coexistence. In addition, they allow us to explore the issue of late Neanderthal survival in regions of Western Eurasia located within early routes of AMH expansion such as the Caucasus. Here we report the direct radiocarbon (14C) dating of a late Neanderthal specimen from a Late Middle Paleolithic (LMP) layer in Mezmaiskaya Cave, northern Caucasus. Additionally, we provide a more accurate chronology for the timing of Neanderthal extinction in the region through a robust series of 16 ultrafiltered bone collagen radiocarbon dates from LMP layers and using Bayesian modeling to produce a boundary probability distribution function corresponding to the end of the LMP at Mezmaiskaya. The direct date of the fossil (39,700 ± 1,100 14C BP) is in good agreement with the probability distribution function, indicating at a high level of probability that Neanderthals did not survive at Mezmaiskaya Cave after 39 ka cal BP ("calendrical" age in kiloannum before present, based on IntCal09 calibration curve). This challenges previous claims for late Neanderthal survival in the northern Caucasus. We see striking and largely synchronous chronometric similarities between the Bayesian age modeling for the end of the LMP at Mezmaiskaya and chronometric data from Ortvale Klde for the end of the LMP in the southern Caucasus. Our results confirm the lack of reliably dated Neanderthal fossils younger than ∼40 ka cal BP in any other region of Western Eurasia, including the Caucasus.

But, I don't understand what this belief is based on:

Higham is re-dating Neanderthal sites throughout Europe and believes all remains will be changed with none begin younger than 39,000 years old. Because of this new find, he believes there is now no evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans were co-existing in Europe for very long at all, and that there is even the possibility that the Neanderthals demise was at the hands of the modern human.

Maybe access to the whole paper would clarify the basis for that belief.

[Warren Stupidity]

7. fine, we were boffing each other in asia then.

[sofa king]

8. Grendel, Daityas, Ispolin, Titans, and the Nephelim wish to disagree.

In fact, human mythology is so replete with the images of giants--and the human imperative of hunting them down and killing them, that as a whole they almost comprise a manual of how to find, spot, and exterminate the Neandertals.

The giants of mythology are often described as the non-deity offspring of gods (i.e. bigger and sometimes smarter), sedentary (usually occupying a single valuable place, which squares well with archaeological evidence that Neandertals moved less than humans), reclusive, and cave or underground dwellers.

It stands to reason that if humans were in fact hunting down Neandertals, the larger sites where they lived (and the ones archaeologists are most likely to find) would be the first to go. So yes, it would appear that they "died out" early, but my bet is that they were being separated and dispersed through extermination efforts that did not end until well after human oral tradition had enshrined them in misty memory.

[Ichingcarpenter]

9. Interesting but flawed facts concurring the Neanderthals

Neanderthals and Cro-Magnum were in small groups of hunter gathering
but Cro-Magnum had a more varied diet that the other thus might not have competed .

http://brainmind.com/BrainMindEvolution.html


They were not giants but shorter and more robust than Cro-Magnum
http://library.thinkquest.org/26070/data/eng/2/2.html

I think the extinction of the Neanderthals was due to other
factors than a war between them and the cro-magnum and the findings
seem to support that.

The giant mythology I think might come from another species of hominid.
but not the Neanderthals.


Giants were even reported by native americans in their tales
I just wish someone would find some bones.

[greyl]

10. Neanderthals ARE human.

Basic.

[laconicsax]

11. Not really...

They were a very close cousin, but not technically human.

Since "human" refers to the line that led to H. sapiens, you can consider H. heidelbergensis, (the last common ancestor between us and Neanderthals) as human, but the H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis lines diverged, meaning Neanderthals weren't human.

Of course, H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis could hybridize and if you start at H. heidelbergensis and trace the two lineages forward, there's no discrete point where you could say that humans and Neanderthals were different enough from the previous generation to be a separate species, but the same could be said for any close evolutionary cousins (and some more distantly related species as well).

Lions (P. leo) and jaguars (P. onca)are different species, but can still hybridize to a varying degrees and if you start at their last common ancestor and go forward, there's no point at which you could definitively say that the two species were different enough from the previous generation to be a separate species.

[greyl]

12. Yes, really. Homo genus = human.

Like lions and panthers share the genus "Panthera".

Human doesn't refer to the line that led to H. Sapiens, it refers to the line that H. Sapiens is a member of.
The genus "Homo".

edit: People too-frequently use the word "human" when they're talking specifically about modern humans:

In popular imagination, Neanderthals are often portrayed as prehistoric brutes who became outsmarted by a more advanced species, humans, emerging from Africa. But excavations and anatomical studies have shown Neanderthals used tools, wore jewelery, buried their dead, cared for their sick, and possibly sang or even spoke in much the same way that we do. Even more humbling, perhaps, their brains were slightly larger than ours.

The results from the new studies confirm the Neanderthal's humanity, and show that their genomes and ours are more than 99.5 percent identical, differing by only about 3 million bases.

"This is a drop in the bucket if you consider that the human genome is 3 billion bases," said Edward Rubin of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who led one of the research teams.

For comparison, the genomes of chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, differ from humans by about 30 million to 50 million base pairs.

The findings also appear to refute speculations by some scientists that Neanderthals and humans interbred in more recent times. "We see no evidence of mixing 30,000 to 40,000 years ago in Europe," Rubin said. "We don't exclude it, but from the data that we have, we have no evidence that pages were ripped from one genome and put in the other."
http://www.livescience.com/1122-neanderthal-99-5-percent-human.html

Neanderthals are often thought of as the stray branch in the human family tree, but research now suggests the modern human is likely the odd man out.

"What people tend to do is draw a line from our ancestors straight to ourselves, and any group that doesn't seem to fit on that line is divergent, distinct, unusual, strange," researcher Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told LiveScience today. "But in terms of evolution of our family tree, the genus Homo, we're the outliers and the Neanderthals are more toward the core."

Humans are not at the inevitable end of a sequence, Trinkaus said. "It just happens that we happen to be alive today and Neanderthals are not."
_________
When compared with our common ancestors, Trinkaus discovered modern humans have roughly twice as many uniquely distinct traits as Neanderthals. In other words, Neanderthals are more like the other members of our family tree than modern humans are.
http://www.livescience.com/7153-scientist-humans-strange-neanderthals-normal.html

[Confusious]

13. delete