Pääbo may have the entire Neanderthal genome sequenced in the next 18 months.

2009-02-13: Draft Genome is announced. Bookmarked also for the nice facial reconstruction.

2009-05-17: We ate them

Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them

2010-09-28: The cloning arguments are nothing new, but I was struck by

There were no cities when the Neanderthals went extinct, and at their population’s peak there may have only been 10k of them spread across Europe. A cloned Neanderthal might be missing the genetic adaptations we have evolved to cope with the world’s greater population density, whatever those adaptations might be. But, not everyone agrees that Neanderthals were so different from modern humans that they would automatically be shunned as outcasts.

2013-08-16: Neanderthal leather-working

Excavations of Neanderthal sites 40 ka BP have uncovered a kind of tool that leather workers still use to make hides more lustrous and water resistant. The bone tools, known as lissoirs, had previously been associated only with modern humans. The latest finds indicate that Neanderthals and modern humans might have invented the tools independently.

2016-05-25: 176 ka ago is unimaginably old. This is more than 15x older than Gobekli Tepe.

After drilling into the stalagmites and pulling out cylinders of rock, the team could see an obvious transition between 2 layers. On one side were old minerals that were part of the original stalagmites; on the other were newer layers that had been laid down after the fragments were broken off by the cave’s former users. By measuring uranium levels on either side of the divide, the team could accurately tell when each stalagmite had been snapped off for construction.

Their date? 176 ka ago, give or take a few millennia. “When I announced the age to Jacques, he asked me to repeat it because it was so incredible”. Outside Bruniquel Cave, the earliest, unambiguous human constructions are just 20 ka old. Most of these are ruins—collapsed collections of mammoth bones and deer antlers. By comparison, the Bruniquel stalagmite rings are well-preserved and far more ancient.

2016-05-27: More Neanderthal than human

In some spots of our genome, we are more Neanderthal than human. the sequences we inherited from archaic hominins helped us survive and reproduce

2017-01-15: Neanderthals Were People, Too

For millenniums, some scientists believe, before modern humans poured in from Africa, the climate in Europe was exceptionally unstable. The landscape kept flipping between temperate forest and cold, treeless steppe. The fauna that Neanderthals subsisted on kept migrating away, faster than they could. Though Neanderthals survived this turbulence, they were never able to build up their numbers. (Across all of Eurasia, at any point in history, “there probably weren’t enough of them to fill a stadium.”) With the demographics so skewed, even the slightest modern human advantage would be amplified tremendously: a single innovation, something like sewing needles, might protect just enough babies from the elements to lower the infant mortality rate and allow modern humans to conclusively overtake the Neanderthals. And yet Stringer is careful not to conflate innovation with superior intelligence. Innovation, too, can be a function of population size. “We live in an age where information, where good ideas, spread like wildfire, and we build on them. But it wasn’t like that 50 ka ago.” The more members your species has, the more likely 1 member will stumble on a useful new technology — and that, once stumbled upon, the innovation will spread; you need sufficient human tinder for those sparks of culture to catch.

2017-09-05: 200 ka Neanderthal Glue

As far back as 200 ka ago Neanderthals were using a tar-based adhesive to glue axe heads and spears to their handles. Researchers have attempted to recreate the Neander-glue, which could help scientists figure out just how technologically sophisticated the species was. Archaeologists have found lumps of adhesive tar likely made from birch bark at Neanderthal sites in Italy and Germany. But just how they made the substance puzzled researchers, especially because they did it without the aid of ceramic pots, which were used by later cultures to produce large quantities of tar.

2019-06-12: Did Neanderthals Speak?

Neanderthals had the anatomical properties to create the sounds that could form the basis of speech, though any words they produced would have sounded a bit unfamiliar to modern human ears

2020-03-04: long distance Neanderthals

Their intercontinental odyssey over 1000s of kilometers is a rarely observed case of long-distance dispersal in the Paleolithic and highlights the value of stone tools as culturally informative markers of ancient population movements.

2022-11-19: Interbreeding in Africa

The human-like Y chromosome entered the Neanderthal gene pool well before the migration out of Africa 80ka BP – perhaps 270ka BP. Which means that many of the Neanderthals that those migrants encountered must have already had human-like Y chromosomes! The Neanderthal Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA are 2 new lines of evidence that point to a much more complex and ancient relationship between us and our closest cousins than we otherwise would have known.

2023-12-15: A new book, The Naked Neanderthal, looks interesting

Next, he explores evidence from skeletal remains for butchery and cannibalism of the dead in Neanderthal communities at Moula Guercy. Some researchers have proposed that such findings are a sign of starvation — evidence that Neanderthals were not able to adapt to the warm Eemian forests. Slimak concludes instead that these behaviors were a natural part of hominin social interactions, citing growing evidence from both archaeology and primatology that such practices were relatively common among humans right through prehistory.
Humans temporarily replaced local Neanderthals 54ka BP over an extraordinarily short time — potentially less than 1 year. The author uses this to argue that extermination, rather than assimilation, is the most likely explanation for the Neanderthals’ eventual extinction.

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