Since Boule’s analysis, our view of Neanderthals has shifted, from a caricature of a caveman to a remarkably sophisticated species. We’ve learned about how they built tools. That they made jewelry. That they, at times, buried their dead. We learned they were possibly stronger than us, and maybe just as smart. [...]
Neanderthal genomes recently sequenced by scientists have revealed that we humans mated with Neanderthals over thousands of years. These couplings are believed to have been rare and sporadic. But they were meaningful: Just about every human today (except those of solely African ancestry) has around 1 to 4 percent Neanderthal genes in every cell of their body. [...]
There’s a common misconception that Neanderthals were our ancestors, that we evolved from them. We did not. Neanderthals and modern humans are believed to have diverged from a common ancestor in the genus Homo sometime around 500,000 years ago. The Neanderthal ancestors moved up to Europe before us, and continued to evolve there. [...]
In 1997, Pääbo’s team became the first to extract Neanderthal DNA from a tiny slice of a 40,000-year-old humerus. That discovery kicked off the "Neanderthal genome project," an effort to decode the entirety of Neanderthals’ genetics from their fossils. In 2014, the team published an entire Neanderthal genome (sourced from the big toe of a female who lived 50,000 years ago in Siberia) in the journal Nature. [...]
"When we look at history and see what Australian aboriginals went through, what Native American people went through, what Easter Islanders went through, it’s hard to say that the Neanderthals would have been better off than these historical cases," Hawks says. "It’s probably the case that Neanderthals went through the Paleolithic version of the contacts we know about through history." (It could also be the case, Hawks says, that we just didn’t really notice Neanderthals were different from us.)
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