Neandertals revised - PubMed (original) (raw)

Review

Neandertals revised

Wil Roebroeks et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016.

Abstract

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 phenotypes in Late Pleistocene Europe and Africa. Both recently obtained genetic evidence and archeological data show that the biological and cultural gaps between these populations were probably smaller than previously thought. These data, reviewed here, falsify inferences to the effect that, compared with their near-modern contemporaries in Africa, Neandertals were outliers in terms of behavioral complexity. It is only around 40,000 y ago, tens of thousands of years after anatomically modern humans first left Africa and thousands of years after documented interbreeding between modern humans, Neandertals and Denisovans, that we see major changes in the archeological record, from western Eurasia to Southeast Asia, e.g., the emergence of representational imagery and the colonization of arctic areas and of greater Australia (Sahul).

Keywords: Middle Paleolithic; Middle Stone Age; Neandertals; early modern humans.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. King W. On the Neanderthal skull, or reasons for believing it to belong to the Clydian Period and to a species different from that represented by man. Notices Abstr Br Assoc Advance Sci. 1864;1863:81–82.
    1. Villa P, Roebroeks W. Neandertal demise: An archaeological analysis of the modern human superiority complex. PLoS One. 2014;9(4):e96424. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Prüfer K, et al. The complete genome sequence of a Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains. Nature. 2014;505(7481):43–49. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Green RE, et al. A draft sequence of the Neandertal genome. Science. 2010;328(5979):710–722. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Liu W, et al. The earliest unequivocally modern humans in southern China. Nature. 2015;526(7575):696–699. - PubMed

Publication types

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources