Latest Neanderthal Stories

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Surrogacy, the act of a woman carrying a child for another person or couple, is a fairly standard and accepted practice in this day and age – unless, of course, you’re being recruited to give birth to the first Neanderthal baby in more than 30,000 years. Then it gets a little unorthodox. Yet, according to a series of reports published over the weekend, that’s exactly what Harvard Medical School geneticist George Church is...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A scientist in Texas is claiming to have sequenced the genome of Bigfoot, alias Sasquatch or Yeti. Researcher Melba Ketchum led a team of scientists in a five-year DNA study purporting to confirm the existence of the hominin hybrid species commonly referred to as Bigfoot. The findings of this study are not yet published and are currently undergoing peer review. The study findings suggest that the mythical creature known as Bigfoot...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A team of anthropologists, led by the University of Toronto, has found evidence that human ancestors used stone tipped weapons for hunting 500,000 years ago. This is 200,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to the new study published in Science. "This changes the way we think about early human adaptations and capacities before the origin of our own species," says Jayne Wilkins, a PhD candidate in the Department of...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online A discovery on the south coast of South Africa is leading to implications that modern humans evolved in this location. Scientists have found evidence for an advanced Stone Age technology that dates back 71,000 years at Pinnacle Point near Mossel Bay. The technology allows projectiles to be thrown at a greater distance and killing power. Considering the technology, along with other findings of advanced technologies and evidence for...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Sully didn't exactly have a French accent in the Ice Age movies, but the creators may want to rethink that with the latest archaeology find. Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a woolly mammoth northeast of Paris, according to the French National Institute for Preventative Archaeological Research (INRAP). The remains found at Changis-sur-Marne included a femur, a complete pelvis, jawbones and four connected vertebrate....

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online Neanderthal men likely adorned themselves with bird feathers, a new study suggests. The researchers believe the feathers were stripped from the remains of birds and worn as decorative ornaments or jewelry, a theory that further suggests early hominids had a strong sense of tradition and culture. The scientists studied bird bones found at European sites used by Neanderthal man, and discovered that bird wings containing large...

Watch the Video: Mysterious Hominids Discovered In Denisova Cave April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A tiny bit of a finger bone, found in a Siberian cave, is shedding light on a rather enigmatic group of early humans called the Denisovans. The 80,000 year-old finger bone, along with two molars, were found in 2010 at the Denisova Cave in southern Siberia's Altai Mountains. Other than the fact that they were contemporaries of Neanderthals, another extinct human...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online New analytical techniques are changing long-held, simplistic views about the evolutionary history of humans in Europe.  The study, reported in the journal Trends in Genetics, found that many cultural, climatic, and demographic events have shaped genetic variation among modern-day European populations and that the variety of those mechanisms is more diverse than previously thought. Recent advances in paleogenetics, or the study of...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new study from the University of Cambridge finds that the DNA similarities between Neanderthals and modern humans are more likely to have arisen from a shared common ancestor than from interbreeding. Previously, it has been suggested that the shared parts of the genome sequence between the two populations was the result of interbreeding, but the new research, published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Two recent articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that the Later Stone Age (LSA) and Modern Culture both emerged much earlier than was previously thought. A team of international scientists from South Africa, France, Italy, Norway, the USA and Britain dated and directly analyzed organic objects found in the archaeological layers at Border Cave, South Africa in the Lebombo Mountains near the border of...