Latest Neanderthal Stories

The 'Sirius' documentary tells the story of how Dr. Ralph Lachman of Stanford University examined the photographs, X Rays and CAT scans of the Atacama Humanoid and concluded that the six inch tall specimen is a 6-8 year old of some type. Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) May 03, 2013 As recently reported by International Business Times,, Discovery, NBCNews and Live Science, Dr. Ralph Lachman of Stanford University, as portrayed in the 'Sirius' documentary, has examined the...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new study, led by the University of Oviedo, Spain, has been able to accurately determine the age of Neanderthal remains found in the El Sidron cave of Asturias, Spain. Previous studies have provided inexact measurements for the remains. The new study found that a pre-treatment to reduce modern carbon contamination has lowered the margin of error from 40,000 to 3,200 years. One of the westernmost Neanderthal sites on the Iberian...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A team of German scientists have fully sequenced the genome of the Neanderthal and said they will be making the entire sequence freely available to the scientific community for research. The genome was produced from the remains of a toe bone found in a cave in Siberia, and is far more detailed than a previous mapping of the ancient genome published three years ago by the same team. Svante Paabo and colleagues at the Max Planck...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists know that early Humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals (H. s. neanderthalensis) coexisted for a short time before the latter eventually became extinct. While it was understood that humans had better developed brains than their more primitive counterparts, it was generally not well-known why these early ancestors made a grand exit. A new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests one...

Alan McStravick for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In a field of study that remains largely in the dark, we have relied on the voice talent of Ray Romano, John Leguizamo and Denis Leary to instruct our children about life in the time of the Ice Age. While the lessons learned aren’t necessarily accurate, one Bournemouth University lecturer on palaeoenvironmental reconstruction and environmental change seemingly thinks it might be a good place to start. Dr. John Stewart, throughout...

Michael Harper for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Julien Riel-Salvatore, PhD, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver, believes Neanderthals may not have been the knuckle-dragging brutes we think them to be, and he’s got the burial practices to prove it. According to his research, the burial practices of the earliest people vary dramatically; from lavish to incredibly simple. This means the earliest people weren’t necessarily unable to...

Enid Burns for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Every civilization leaves clues in artifacts that can tell of how a civilization once lived, thrived, and even became extinct. Now scientists are taking a closer look into a few archeological finds to look at how diseases once thrived and evolved. Particularly, scientists are looking at the teeth of ancient skeletons. A team of scientists led by the University of Adelaide's Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) published research in the...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Popular theories have placed the Neanderthal extinction at about 35,000 years ago, based on dating of the earliest bone fossils found at a Neanderthal site in southern Iberia. However, researchers from Australia and Europe are now refuting that evidence after taking another careful look at the bones and implementing an improved method to filter out contamination. Based on the new study, the Neanderthal may have actually died out much...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Several media reports popped up around the web over the past day or two saying Harvard Medical School genetics expert George Church was looking for an adventurous woman who could carry and give birth to a Neanderthal baby. But as fast as the stories went up, Church was criticizing them for jumping the gun. He said in an interview with the Associated Press Tuesday that he and Harvard “have no projects, no plans, we have no...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A multinational team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has sequenced nuclear and mitochondrial DNA extracted from the leg of an early modern human found in the Tianyuan Cave near Beijing, China. The Tianyuan human shared a common origin with the ancestor of many present-day Asians and Native Americans, the analysis showed. Moreover, the team found that the proportion of Neanderthal and Denisovan...