Biology Now, 2e

302 ■ CHAPTER 17 Animals and Human Evolution

BIODIVERSITY

twenty-first century, Laura Longo, a curator at

the Civic Natural History Museum of Verona,

Italy, decided to take a second look at a group

of fossils excavated from a rock shelter called

Riparo Mezzena. Riparo Mezzena is nestled

in the Lessini Mountains in northern Italy, a

wide-open landscape speckled with large rocks

and evergreen trees. The region is snowy and

silent in the winter but green and thriving in the

summer, when paleontologists come to work.

In the 1950s, paleontologists had carefully

collected fossils of Neanderthals that lived

around Riparo Mezzena about 35,000 years

ago, late in the history of Neanderthals. But the

fossils had sat at the museum, untouched, for

over 50 years (Figure 17.1). Now, Longo believed,

the fossils could help answer a hotly debated

question about human history: How closely did

modern humans and Neanderthals interact?

Animal Kingdom

Modern humans and Neanderthals lived in

some of the same areas of Europe at the same

times. Because of this proximity, some paleon-

tologists hypothesize that as modern humans

expanded their territory, Neanderthals were

I

n popular culture, Neanderthals are ugly,

hairy cavemen with big brains but no wits.

The first Neanderthal bones were discovered

in Germany in 1856, and since then we’ve culti-

vated an image of our closest extinct human

relatives as hulking brutes who communi-

cated by grunting, walked like chimps, and hit

each other over the head with clubs. Yet, over

the years, paleontologists have dug up fossil-

ized vocal bones, sophisticated tools, and other

evidence suggesting that Neanderthals were

a fairly advanced group—and not as different

from our own species as we once believed.

The big revelation came in 2010, when scien-

tists sequenced the Neanderthal genome and

compared it to the modern human genome:

Humans have some Neanderthal DNA. Our two

species may have been a whole lot closer than we

thought. “There could have been interbreeding

between modern humans and Neanderthals,”

says Silvana Condemi, a researcher at the National

Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) at Aix-

Marseille University in France. “We can imagine

they not only exchanged culture, but exchanged

genes.” That’s right: mounting evidence suggests

that Neanderthals and modern humans had sex.

This story begins where many stories end—

with a pile of bones. In the early years of the

Figure 17.1

Fossil remains

A jawbone like this one was found at the Riparo Mezzena rock shelter in the Lessini Mountains in Italy.

The individual it belonged to lived between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago.