Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
130,000 years ago. Neanderthals spread subsequently and were enormously
successful—their remains have been found in Gibraltar, in northern and east-
ern Europe, and as far east as Iran. The much older peoples whom they seem to
have displaced are now collectively referred to as pre-Neanderthals.
Then, starting about 30,000 years ago, the European Neanderthals were
displaced in their turn by the latest wave of immigrants to arrive from Africa
via the Middle East. These immigrants included the Cro-Magnon people and
other modern humans.
This unfolding scenario from the fossil and archeological record of
Europe dovetails neatly with the emerging molecular record. The only
ancient hominan bones from which meaningful amounts of DNA have been
extracted so far are Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon remains from Europe. The
DNA was preserved because these bones stayed relatively cool and dry. The
growing number of Neanderthal DNA sequences now becoming available
place the Neanderthals clearly in a separate lineage from our own, while the
Cro-Magnons are defi nitely modern humans with some ai nities to present-
day Middle-Eastern populations.
The DNA branch point that divides the Neanderthal and modern human
lineages can be dated to about 600,000 years ago. But the errors on this
number are so large that the time at which the Neanderthals branched of
from us could be as much as a million years ago, roughly the same time as
the appearance of the earliest European hominan fossils. Or it may be that
there were successive waves of hominans entering Europe that eventually
recombined and reassorted with earlier migrants to become the Neander-
thals. There is fascinating evidence that humans and chimpanzees did not
speciate instantaneously 6 million years ago, but that the speciation process
was much more complicated and lengthy. Perhaps the origin of the Neander-
thals will be discovered to be equally complex.
7
The Neanderthals were remarkably successful* and mobile. They made
decorative objects, and the Neanderthal tribes in the interior of France acquired,
* The recent astonishing discovery of an ancient mitochondrial sequence, more than twice as
divergent from ours as the Neanderthal sequences, from a single fi nger bone found in a Sibe-
rian cave that has signs of Neanderthal occupancy, may give us a fi rst glimpse of the relation-
ship between the Neanderthals and the pre-Neanderthals. Stay tuned!
