Belgian Neanderthal remains, including the world-famous Neanderthals of Spy, are thousands of years older than previously assumed. This is the conclusion of an international research team that re-dated the Belgian Neanderthal remains with a new technique. This discovery implies that Neanderthals disappeared from Belgium much earlier than thought and are therefore no longer the youngest Neanderthals in Europe.
The robust Neanderthals dominated Europe and Asia until about 50,000 years ago, until modern humans replaced them. Neanderthals also lived in our regions. Numerous finds in the Walloon Meuse basin bear witness to this. The Neanderthals of Spy, which are kept in the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS), are said to be the youngest in Europe at 37,000 years old. However, a new study led by Oxford University, in which the RBINS also collaborated, has now shown that Belgian Neanderthals disappeared from the region between 44,200 and 40,600 years ago, much earlier than previously assumed. Contamination of the samples would have been the cause of the incorrect dating.
A new method
A multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, geologists, geneticists, and anthropologists re-dated Neanderthal fossils from the Spy cave and two other Belgian sites, Fonds-de-Forêt ((including a femur preserved at the RBINS) and Engis. They used a new dating method in which only the amino acid hydroxyproline is dated. This method limits the risk of contamination by, for example, glue. The results show that Neanderthal remains are older than previously thought, in some cases even 10,000 years older.
For example, the team discovered that a shoulder blade from a Spy Neanderthal (preserved at the ULiège), which had previously yielded very recent data (around 28 000 years ago), was heavily contaminated with bovine DNA. The results suggest that the bone was preserved with an adhesive prepared from bovine bones. ‘These new chemical methods are the only way we can remove contamination from the samples with certainty,’ says Thibaut Devièse (University of Oxford), first author of the study. 'The molecules we date come only from the bone, and not from other sources.’
Cultural transition
'Dating is crucial in archaeology,’ stresses Tom Higham (University of Oxford), who leads the PalaeoChron research project, 'because without a reliable chronological framework, we can’t really understand the relationships between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. When Homo sapiens moved into Europe 45,000 years ago, Neanderthals began to disappear. These new methods are hugely important to investigate this transition’.
'Dating all these Belgian specimens was very exciting’, says Grégory Abrams, of the Scladina Cave Archaeological Centre in Belgium. 'They played a major role in the understanding and the definition of Neanderthals. Almost two centuries after the discovery of the Neanderthal child of Engis, we were able to provide a reliable age.’
The team is now analyzing archaeological evidence, such as bone tools, to further refine our picture of the cultural transition between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in our region.
So now Spy’s Neanderthals are no longer the most recent in Europe, but inevitably the young Neanderthal fossils from Gibraltar, Catalonia and south-west France will also be (re)dated using the new technique.
Deep in the caves of Goyet in Belgium researchers have found the grisly evidence that the Neanderthals did not just feast on horses or reindeer, but also on each other.
Human bones from a newborn, a child and four adults or teenagers who lived around 40,000 years ago show clear signs of cutting and of fractures to extract the marrow within, they say.
“It is irrefutable, cannibalism was practised here,” says Belgian archaeologist Christian Casseyas as he looks inside a cave halfway up a valley in this site in the Ardennes forest.
The bones in Goyet date from when Neanderthals were nearing the end of their time on earth before being replaced by Homo sapiens, with whom they also interbred. Read more.
look: our neanderthal ancestors took care of the sick and disabled so if ur post-apocalyptic scenario is an excuse for eugenics, u are a bad person and literally have less compassion than a caveman
Yes but they also when extinct which implies whatever they were doing at the time wasn’t fit for their environment.
So, it’s been awhile since I took a human evolution course, so some of this might be a little out of date, but
1) Whether or not Neanderthals went extinct is still kind of up for debate, and seems to hinge largely on whether you think that Neanderthals are a H. Sapiens subspecies or not, which often seems like a mildly pointless argument to me since it’s largely a fight about which definition of “species” to use
2) Even if we argue that Neanderthals are our direct ancestors and never went extinct, several Neanderthal *traits* (like their noses and their forheads) *have* left the population. Care for the disabled is not one of them.
Saying “Neanderthals cared for their sick and injured and are now extinct, therefore care for the disabled is maladaptive” is like saying “Dodos are extinct therefore beaks are a terrible idea”
Statements about “less compassion than a caveman” still stand.
–Peter
Iteach human evolution to college students, so in addition to that, here’s what we know. There’s some citations (and footnotes) behind the cut, if you’re interested.
So Neanderthals aren’t our direct ancestor- more like a branch of the family tree that didn’t lead to us. Close cousins- close enough to breed- but they evolved outside of Africa about 400kya, while our species evolved in Africa about 200kya*. This is important because it means that altruism can’t possibly be a Neanderthal trait that left the population during the evolution into modern humans; we didn’t evolve from them, so it’s not like we can say “well, this was maladaptive in our ancestors.” This is a behavior you see in two temporally coexisting species (or subspecies), and I do mean two, because it wasn’t just Neanderthals practicing altruism. We did it too.
We have really good evidence that early Homo sapiens sapiens (i.e.,us, just old) also took care of their injured, elderly, and disabled. At Cro-Magnon in France, a few individuals clearly suffered from traumatic injury and illness during their lives. Cro-Magnon 1 had a nasty infection in his face; his bones are pitted from it. Cro-Magnon 2, a female, had a partially healed skull fracture, and several of the others had fused neck vertebrae that had fused as a result of healed trauma; this kind of injury would make it impossible to hunt and uncomfortable to move. This kind of injury can be hard to survive today, even with modern medical care; the fact that the individuals at Cro-Magnon survived long enough for the bones to remodel and heal indicate that somebody was taking care of them. At Xujiayao, in northern China, there’s evidence of healed skull fractures (which would have had a rather long recovery time and needed care);
This evidence of altruism extends past injured adults, as well. One of the most compelling cases is at Qafzeh, which is in Israel. Here we see evidence of long-term care for a developmentally disabled child (as well as a child who had hydrocephaly and survived). Qafzeh 11, a 12-13 year old at time of death, suffered severe brain damage as a child. Endocasts (basically making a model of the inside of the skull, where the brain would be) show that the volume of the brain was much smaller than expected; likely the result of a growth delay due to traumatic brain injury. The patterns of development suggest that this injury occurred between the ages of 4 and 6. They very likely suffered from serious neurological problems; the areas of the brain that were injured are known to control psychomotricity. This means that the kid may have had a hard time controlling their eye movements, general body movement, keeping visual attention, performing specific tasks, and managing uncertainty; in addition, Broca’s area might also have been damaged, which likely would have affected the kid’s ability to speak. Long and short of it, without help, this kid wouldn’t have survived to age 12-13.
But they did. They lived, and they were loved. When they died, they were given a funeral- we know this based on body position and funeral offerings. Mortuary behavior was common among both Neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens, and this burial was particularly interesting. The body was placed on its back, its legs extended and the arms crossed over the chest. Deer antlers were laid on the upper part of the chest; in the archaeological context, they were in close contact with the palmar side of the hand bones, meaning it’s likely that they were placed in the hands before burial. This points to Qafzeh 11 being valued by the community- why go to the effort for somebody you don’t care about? Compassion is a very human trait, and to call it maladaptive is to ignore hundreds of thousands of years of human experience.
The surfaces of all cells in nature are festooned with a complex and diverse array of sugar chains (called glycans). These perform a wide variety of biological functions, from the proper folding of proteins to cell-to-cell interactions. Their ubiquity in nature underscores their essentialness to complex life.
This week, the fourth edition of “Essentials of Glycobiology” (the study of glycans) was published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. It’s a continuation and updating of landmark work by a consortium of editors, led by Ajit Varki, MD, Distinguished Professor in the departments of Medicine and Cellular and Molecular Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine, with contributions from a number of UC San Diego scientists and physicians, including Jeffrey D. Esko, PhD, Distinguished Professor of cellular and molecular medicine; Pascal Gagneux, PhD, professor of pathology and anthropology, and Kamil Godula, PhD, associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Amanda Lewis PhD, professor of obstetrics-gynecology and reproductive science.
Varki and Esko are also founding directors of the Glycobiology Research and Training Center (GRTC) at UC San Diego, established in 1999, and have recently handed over leadership to Lewis and Godula.
Glycobiology is a relatively new scientific discipline. The term was only coined in 1988, recognizing the combining of carbohydrate chemistry and biochemistry to focus on glycans, which have since proven to have a multitude of diverse and often critical roles in biology.
They have been linked to human origins and as a key evolutionary marker. They are found to both inhibit and promote tumor growth; and the presence of a particular sialic acid in red meat may be linked to increased cancer risk in humans. Another class of glycans called glycosaminoglycans have been shown by Esko and colleagues to be involved in COVID-19 coronavirus pathogenesis. The cover of the fourth edition presents an all-atom model of infamous spike protein of the pandemic virus, emphasizing the massive array of glycan chains modelled by UC San Diego professor of biology Rommie Amaro.
Varki, Esko and colleagues at the GRTC have been central to many of the advances in glycobiology, and the textbook, which originally debuted in 1999, has been an enduring effort to broadly introduce and describe the rapidly changing discipline.
For example, the second edition of “Essentials of Glycobiology,” published in 2008, appeared simultaneously in print from the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, and free online to reach a wider audience. Subsequent editions have also been free online at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Library of Medicine.
“This approach ensures that everyone, from the layperson to the high school student to the graduate student in a developing country, has free access to the knowledge the book contains, while increasing awareness of the availability of a printed edition that may be more suitable for some readers’ requirements,” said Varki at the time.
— Scott LaFee
Pictured above: In this electron micrograph, the surface of a bacterium is fuzzy with a coating of glycans.
