Neandertals – Life, Work, Vanishing

Neandertals

What is a Neandertal? A Neandertal (Homo neanderthalensis or Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) is a kind of human that lived in Europe and Western Asia until around 30,000 years ago. The first Neandertal skeleton was found by quarry workers in 1856 in the Neander Valley in Germany. At first people thought the oddlooking skeleton was that of a diseased person or of a Cossack from the Napoleonic War...

Neandertals revised.

The last decade has seen a significant growth of our knowledge of the Neandertals, a population of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers who lived in (western) Eurasia between ∼400,000 and 40,000 y ago. Starting from a source population deep in the Middle Pleistocene, the hundreds of thousands of years of relative separation between African and Eurasian groups led to the emergence of different phenotype...

Why not the Neandertals?

Some workers have suggested that a hypothetical genetic mutation in an African population less than 100,000 years ago led to a cascade of neurological changes in the human brain that culminated in the appearance of modern language. Language then triggered the socioeconomic and cognitive changes we associate with behavioral modernity and Africans, armed with behavioral modernity, then spread out...

Neandertals...150 years later.

The place of Neandertals in modern human emergence has been a subject of debate since the first recognized Neandertal skeleton was discovered in 1856. This paper presents an overview of morphological, archaeological, and genetic evidence commonly used in discussions of Neandertals and their evolutionary significance. A brief historical sketch of the argument provides insight into the changing v...

Work-life balance.