January/February 2019^ DISCOVER^43
Neanderthals,
They’re Just Like Us
Let’s retire, once and for all,
the outdated notion that
Neanderthals were dumb
brutes, an idea that’s stuck
despite a raft of contrary
finds over the last
decade. In 2018, a trio
of studies from separate
teams unearthed yet
more evidence that our
closest evolutionary kin
were capable of complex
abstract thought, including
symbolic art (February, Science),
cooperative big-game hunting tactics (June,
Nature Ecology & Evolution) and the production
of fire using stone tools (July, Scientific Reports).First-Generation Human Hybrid
Researchers recovered the genome of a teenage
girl, who lived about 90,000 years ago, from an
inch-long splinter of bone found in Denisova
Cave in Siberia. Her mother was Neanderthal
and her father was Denisovan, another species of
extinct human. While geneticists have previously
uncovered evidence of interbreeding in the genus
Homo, this new find, announced in August in
Nature, is the first time researchers have identified
the first-generation offspring of different archaic
human populations.From the Feet of Babes
We modern, bipedal humans walk efficiently
on two legs, but evolved from tree-dwellers
that didn’t. Exactly when in our origin story
that transition from arboreal to terrestrial living
occurred has long been a contentious issue in
paleoanthropology.
Many researchers
consider Australopithecus
afarensis, living 3 million
to 4 million years ago
in East Africa, the first
fully bipedal ancestor.
In Science Advances
in July, however, a
team analyzing the
3.32 million-year-old
partial foot of a juvenile
A. afarensis reported
adaptations for efficient
tree climbing not seen
in adult members of
the same species. The
researchers think the traits may mean younger
A. afarensis individuals hung out in the trees for
safety from predators but, once fully grown, spent
time on the ground foraging.FURTHER AFIELD
Shangchen, China
A single site in northern China has turned
up nearly 100 stone tools made over a span
of 800,000 years. The oldest are about
2.1 million years old, the earliest evidence
of hominins outside Africa. Published in
Nature in July, analysis of the artifacts
noted they were found with the bones of
deer and other animals, but no hominin
fossils. A 1964 excavation a few miles away,
however, turned up a 1.63 million-year-old
partial Homo erectus skull.Attirampakkam, India
Scores of stone tools up to 385,000 years old are
evidence that H. sapiens left Africa much earlier
than thought, say the authors of a January study
in Nature, although no human bones were found.
Other researchers, however, believe the tools are
not as advanced as the authors claim and could
have been made by another, more archaic species.
The young
hominin’s
skullNeanderthal
artwork in a
Spanish cave