Tag: Neanderthal

The Prehistory of Compassion: Neanderthals Cared Too

New research by archaeologists at the University of York suggests that it is beyond reasonable doubt Neanderthals often misrepresented as furry, primitive caveman hobbling about had a deep seated sense of compassion.

Dr Penny Spikins, Andy Needham and Holly Rutherford from the universitys Department of Archaeology examined the archaeological record in search for evidence for compassionate acts in early humans. These illustrate the way emotions began to emerge in our ancestors six million years ago,which developed into the idea of ‘compassion’ we know today.

We have traditionally paid a lot of attention to how early humans thought about each other, but it may well be time to pay rather more attention to whether or not they ‘cared’, said Dr Spikins.

From Hominity to Humanity

Nowadays, ‘compassion’ which literally means ‘to suffer together’ is considered a great virtue by numerous philosophies and all the major religious traditions. But when did start to grow a desire to soother others’ distress? In the study ‘From hominity to humanity: Compassion from the earliest archaic to modern humans’, the researchers took on the unique challenge of charting key stages in the evolutionearly human’s emotional motivation to help others. They proposea four stage model for the development of human compassion:

Compassion is perhaps the most fundamental human emotion. It binds us together and can inspire us but it is also fragile and elusive

Stage 1 – It begins six million years ago when the common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees experienced the first awakenings of an empathy for others and motivation to help them, perhaps with a gesture of comfort or moving a branch to allow them to pass.

Stage 2 – The second stage from 1.8 million years ago sees compassion in Homo erectus beginning to be regulated as an emotion integrated with rational thought. Care of sick individuals represented an extensive compassionate investment while the emergence of special treatment of the dead suggested grief at the loss of a loved one and a desire to soothe others feelings.

Stage 3 – In Europe between around 500,000 and 40,000 years ago, early humans such as Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals developed deep-seated commitments to the welfare of others illustrated by a long adolescence and a dependence on hunting together.

There is evidence of the routine care of the injured or infirm over extended periods. These include the remains of a child with a congenital brain abnormality who was not abandoned but lived until five or six years old millennia later, the Spartans would have acted differently. A Neanderthal with a withered arm, deformed feet and blindness in one eye must have been cared for, perhaps for as long as twenty years.

Stage 4 – In modern humans starting 120,000 years ago, compassion was extended to strangers, animals, objects and abstract concepts.

Dr Penny Spikins, lead author of the study, said that new research developments, such as neuro-imaging, have enabled archaeologists to attempt a scientific explanation of what were once intangible feelings of ancient humans and that the research was only the first step in a much needed prehistoric archaeology of compassion.

Compassion is perhaps the most fundamental human emotion. It binds us together and can inspire us but it is also fragile and elusive, said Dr Spikins.

This apparent fragility makes addressing the evidence for the development of compassion in our most ancient ancestors a unique challenge, yet the archaeological record has an important story to tell about the prehistory of compassion.

Dr Spikins will give a free lecture, ‘Neanderthals in love: What can archaeology tell us about the feelings of ancient humans’, about the research at the University of York on Tuesday 19 October.

‘From hominity to humanity: Compassion from the earliest archaic to modern humans’ by Dr Penny Spikins, Andy Needham and Holly Rutherford is published in the journal Time and Mind. The study is also available as a book, ‘The Prehistory of Compassion’, available for purchase online.

One Step Closer to Understanding Neanderthal Locomotion

LABO Neanderthal Walk A new research project from the Universit Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) takes us one step further as it comes to understanding Neanderthal locomotion. The Laboratory of Anatomy, Biomechanics and Organogenesis’ (LABO for short) project created a 3D virtual reconstruction of a pair of Neanderthal lower limbs.

The skeleton shows the Neanderthals had the same moves as we do and between 5% and 20% more leverage than us.

Homonids (that includes all forms of the human lineage, be it extinct or living) started bipedal locomotion (moving by means of your two rear limbs or, in our case, legs) some 6 million years ago. When you compare our ‘modern man’ gait to that of our fellow hominids, man takes giant steps. But what about the Neanderthals? To which degree is their locomotion comparable to ours?

In the early twentieth century it was believed that Neanderthals were furry (and dumb) creatures, hobbling about. These ideas persisted until the late ’50s, when a more objective analysis of Neanderthal fossils led to the realisation they weren’t that dissimilar to humans. (Thatearly humans thought it ‘not done’ to have sex with those ‘hairy caveman’ was only revised recently.)

Today, it is assumed that the skeletal morphology of the Neanderthals allowed them to walk the same way we do. However, there is little quantifiable data to substantiate this hypothesis. The Homo neanderthalensis has been extinct for some 20,000 years now (sorry to break the news), making direct observation of their walking capabilities impossible.

Another major problem when trying to trace the Neanderthal’s steps, is the lack of fossil record. To date, no complete Neanderthal skeleton has been found, and scientists don’t even have a sufficient number of bones to reconstruct an entire limb.

Neanderthal joint architecture is mechanically compatible with modern human locomotion.

So LABO’s first objective was to compose a 3D model of Neanderthal lower limbs using fossils found at three different sites the remains used to belong to individuals known as Spy II (discovered in Belgium), Kebara 2 (Israel) and Neanderthal 1 (Germany). To make this ‘virtual assembly’ possible, the researchers had to ‘scale’ the different virtual fragments, taking into account the estimated size of the three Neanderthal individuals.

To determine if the characteristics of the skeleton are consistent with ‘modern locomotion’, the team then merged the 3D reconstruction with movement data obtained from (human) volunteers. The resulting model showed no indication that Neanderthals did not show the same range of motion as humans; Neanderthal joint architecture is mechanically compatible with modern human locomotion.

However, it needs to be noted, walking isn’t just about bones, joints and muscles. Movement is monitored by the brain, and unfortunately data on the Neanderthal brain remains too fragmentary to say whether it was capable of controlling and monitoring of such movements.

Next, information relating to the lower limb muscle was added to the model, as to answer a second question relating to Neanderthal physiology: when compared to our skeletons, how much mechanical advantage did the Neanderthal’s more robust skeleton give to the attached muscles?

The researchers found that at an equal size the reconstructed Neanderthal muscoloskeletal system shows a strength larger than that of modern humans. The Neanderthal’s mechanical advantage is estimated to be 5% to 20% morethan ours. The research (to be published in the journal Palevol under the title Reconstruction virtuelle des membres infrieurs Nandertaliens et estimation des bras de levier des muscle ischio-jambiers) confirms the idea that their big-boned morphology allowed the Neanderthals to be more effective in a hostile environment where increased mobility was likely synonymous with a greater chance of survival.

In cooperation with the Belgian Royal Institute of Natural Science, the LABO is currently working on a more detailed, and complete, virtual model of the Neanderthal skeleton found at Spy. The final model will be used to generate a 3D skeleton (much like was done to Tutankhamen’s mummy?) and a hyper-realistic 3D reconstruction by artists Adrie and Alfons Kennis. Both will be presented at the new ‘Spy Man’ exhibition in the spring of 2011.

Rehabilitating the Neanderthals – Accusations Uluzzian Man Took H. Sapiens Tools Prove False

Neanderthals are not stupid For decades scientists believed Neanderthals developed ‘modern’ tools and ornaments solely through contact with Homo sapiens, and it is often said that the cavemen weren’t able to adapt their hunting techniques to the changing climate quickly enough to prevent their extinction.

A new study nowsuggests these sturdy ancients were well capable of innovating without our help, adding to the growing pool of evidence that Neanderthal man was not a primitive, clumbering caveman.

Basically, I am rehabilitating neanderthals, explainsJulien Riel-Salvatore, assistant professor of anthropology at UC Denver. They were far more resourceful than we have given them credit for.

Uluzzian Innovation

About 42,000 years ago, the Aurignacian culture, attributed to modern Homo sapiens, appeared in northern Italy while central Italy continued to be occupied by Neanderthals of the Mousterian culture which had been around for at least 100,000 years. At this time a new culture arose in the south of Italy, one also thought to be created by Neanderthals. They were the Uluzzian and they were very different.

But when southern Italy too experienced a shift in climate, and the trees were replaced by grasslands, the regio’s inhabitants faced the stark choice of adapting or dying out.

This stands in contrast to the ideas of the past 50 years that Neanderthals had to be acculturated to humans to come up with this technology. When we show Neanderthals could innovate on their own it casts them in a new light. It ‘humanizes’ them if you will.

The evidence suggests the Uluzzian began using darts or arrows to hunt smaller game to supplement the increasingly scarce larger mammals they traditionally hunted. Riel-Salvatore identified projectile points, ochre, bone tools, ornaments and possible evidence of fishing and small game hunting at Uluzzian archaeological sites throughout southern Italy.

These innovations are not traditionally associated with Neanderthals, suggesting they evolved independently, likely as a reaction to the dramatic changes in climate. But more importantly, they emerged in an area geographically separated from modern humans.

My conclusion is that if the Uluzzian is a Neanderthal culture it suggests that contacts with modern humans are not necessary to explain the origin of this new behaviour. This stands in contrast to the ideas of the past 50 years that Neanderthals had to be acculturated to humans to come up with this technology, he said. When we show Neanderthals could innovate on their own it casts them in a new light. It ‘humanizes’ them if you will.

The Neanderthal as Intelligent Being

We credit dolphins, monkeys and even pigs with ‘intelligence’, but common perceptionis only to oftenthatof the Neanderthals as thick-skulled, primitive ‘cavemen’. Yet, the Neanderthal weren’t ‘dumb’.

For starters, they had larger cranial capacities than our own species, andmammalian DNA retrieved from Neandertal stone tools suggests theysuccesfully huntend largegame.Neanderthals evenused a primitive form of make-up, although not if this was for ornamental or symbolic reasons (likely both).

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MEanderthal iPhone app – Morph yourself (and your friends) into a caveman!

If you’re non-African there’s a good chance 1 to 4% of your DNA is ‘Neanderthal’. But how would we look if we were 100% ‘prehistoric man’? Find out with this free app for iPhone and Android.

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Also,a study comparing the amount of cutting-edge, production efficiency and life time of Neanderthal tools (flint flakes) with the narrow flint blades used by more modern human argued that there was no technical advantage to the blades. Upper Paleolithic technology was not necessarily better, just different. (If you think ofotherexamples, !)

Where did the Neanderthals go?

The powerfully built (and steroid-fuelled, if you like) Neanderthals were first discovered in Germanys Neander Valley in 1856. The oldest remains with Neanderthal characteristics date to about 130,000 years ago. These Neanderthals disappear from the fossil record in Asia about 50,000 years ago and in Europe about 20,000 years later. Why the Neanderthal vanished remains unclear.

The ‘interbreeding hypothesis’ suggests that they were a subspecies that bred with Homo sapiens, disappearing through absorbtion. An alternative scenario is that Neanderthals were a separate species and got replaced by the Homo sapiens overrun by more advanced modern humans arriving in Europe from Africa.

Riel-Salvatore rejects that the Neanderthals were exterminated by modern humans. Homo sapiens might simply have existed in larger groups and had slightly higher birthrates, he said.

A recent study shows the Neanderthals share between 1 and 4 percent of their genetic material to the people of Asia and Europe. It has been suggested it is due to interbreeding between Neanderthals and the ancestors of non-Africans after they left Africa. But even if we did to some extent sleep with the ‘primitive caveman’, the populations that remained100% Neanderthal were probably out-competed and marginalized to extinction.

Riel-Salvatore’s research, to be published in Decembers Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, isbased on seven years of studying Neanderthal sites throughout Italy, with special focus on the vanished Uluzzian culture.

MEanderthaler iPhone App – Morphing technology brings out the Caveman in you

We all know we have a bit of Neanderthal in us, but how would you look if you were to up that amount?A new application for iPhone and Android allows you to create a pretty prehistoric, personalised mug shot, by morphing your face into that of an early human. Using ‘MEanderthal’, within seconds (watch the video here), you get to see what you would have looked like, if you lived thousands of years ago and ended up on the wrong ‘branch’ of evolution.

The app, released by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, is a mobile edition of the very popular ‘morphing station’ at the Smithsonian thatcreates the same facial transformation.

For the ‘caveman morphs’ created, the ‘MEanderthal’ app relies on what we’ve learned about the appearance of our extinct relatives through reconstructions of their skulls and general physique. Neanderthal faces tend to have much bigger noses. Big noses were good for humidifying and warming glacial, ice age air, Briana Pobiner, a palaeoanthropologist at the Smithsonian told Live Science.

Quick video demo of the morphing into caveman

Jon *cough* volunteered *cough* to demonstrate how a ‘modern day human’ face gets morphed into that of an early human. The app ‘dissolves’ the photo into a portrait of the species chosen (we opted for ‘Heidelberg Man’ for Jon) and keeps the areas around the eyes on mouth.

Using MEanderthal on iPhone is quite simple. You take a nice portrait shot of your face (we advise against a white wall, frontal lighting) which you then upload and line up with markers for the eyes, nose and mouth. Then select the human species you’d like to ‘de-evolve’ into:

Homo neanderthalensis (male and female) – Modelled respectively by Prad and Meral
Homo floresiensis (female) – Modelled by Rebecca and Ann
Homo heidelbergensis (male) – Modelled by Sean

You can then email the results (with some extra information on your ‘species’) to yourself or friends, or share them on Facebook for your friends to comment upon.

Don’t be embarrassed, download the free application – andgive morphing yourself backwards in time a try! (If you’re non-indigenous African, you could have 1-4% Neanderthal DNA, anyway.)

Just don’t hesistate !;)

Neanderthal DNA Sequenced – How Similar are they to Modern Humans?

svante paabo with reconstructed neanderthal skull Some 400,000 years ago, Neanderthals diverged from the primate line that led to present-day humans. The Homo neanderthalis died out 30,000 years ago, while we managed to evolve into the handsomely built, technically skilled, and somewhat reasonable animal we are today. Research into Neanderthal DNA now shows that our extinct relatives did leave their mark in the genomes of some modern humans, leading researchers to believe that our species ‘paired up’ with our less evolutionary successful cousins when we were both living in the Middle East, about 100,000 to 50,000 years ago and before we left to populate Europe and Asia.

Neanderthals are the most recent, extinct relatives of modern humans. The current fossil records suggest they diverged from the primate line that led to the Homo sapiens some 400,000 years ago in Africa. Neanderthals then migrated north into Eurasia, where they became a geographically isolated group, evolving independent of the line that led to modern humans in Africa. They lived in Europe and western Asia, and Neanderthal remains have been found as far east as southern Siberia and as far south as the Middle East. Until 370,000 years later about 30,000 years or approximately 1500 generations ago they disappeared.

For comparison, another of our relatives, the chimpanzee not extinct yet, but endangered diverged from the same primate line some five to seven million years ago. Currently there are about half a million chimps populating Planet Earth, almost seven billion humans and zero Neanderthals.

Click the images for a larger version. Then use the arrow buttons to browse the slideshow.

In the last decades, controversy has surrounded the question of whether Neanderthals interbred with anatomically modern humans. Both physical properties of early man (derived from fossils) and DNA research have been used to argue both for and against an, errr, genetic contribution by Neanderthals towards the kind of animal we are today. Previous studies comparing Neanderthal and human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) have failed to provide a match, and thus evidence for interbreeding or ‘admixture’. However, this does not exclude the possibility of Neanderthal-on-human action, leading to Neanderthals contributing other parts of their genome to our present day genetic make-up.

Researchers have now produced the first whole Neanderthal sequence written as a succession of three billion letters using DNA samples from the bones of three female Neanderthals who lived and died at the Vindija Cave in Croatia some 40,000 years ago. The study was published in last week’s Science.

Complete Neanderthal Genome Sequenced

Working with ancient, sample-derived DNA is tough when compared with fresh samples, said Andy Bhattacharjee of Agilent’s Life Sciences Group. Thirty to forty thousand years have passed since Neanderthals walked on earth, and all that is left are ancient bones containing severely degraded DNA. The DNA itself has also undergone a sort of chemical aging, deamination.

Svante Pbo, Director of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, says the main problem that arose when doing this was contamination by other organisms. Over 95 percent of the DNA in one sample originated from bacteria and microorganisms which colonized the Neanderthals after their death.

Therefore, removal of this contaminant DNA is of paramount importance, as this allows more coverage of the endogenous genome and therefore allows one to better decipher the genetic code. The capture methodology solves this big problem by enriching for Neanderthal sequences and depleting contaminant DNA. It’s an elegant solution, adds Bhattacharjee.

The method, published in the same May 2010 issue of the journal Science as the Neanderthal study, uses two rounds of ‘target enrichment’ procedure to enrich ancient DNA from rare and precious bone samples so it can be sequenced.

Another factor was human DNA, which could enter the samples during excavation or in the laboratory, jeopardizing the results. Various techniques were used to prevent this from influencing the results: each DNA fragment was marked with a short synthetic piece of DNA as a label, the samples were processed in ultra-clean rooms and various tests were run on the date to ensure contamination was minimized.

Comparing the draft Neanderthal genome sequence with the genetic sequence of humans and chimpanzees allows scientists to catalog the genetic differences. The researchers do so by identifying features that are unique to present-day humans and estimating when these mutations took place, as well as checking their findings against the fossil record for the evolution of hominins.

However, the new data suggests evolution did not proceed in a straight line. The diagram that shows how the different branches of hominins split off from one another that we were shown in high school might, as we suspected, just be too simplistic. Rather, evolution appeared to be a messier process, with emerging species merging back into the lines from which they diverged.

The comparison of these two genetic sequences enables us to find out where our genome differs from that of our closest relatives, said Svante Pbo.

Cataloging What Makes us Human

reconstructed neanderthal skeleton

By comparing the Neanderthal and modern genetic sequences, researchers have tried to discover genes that distinguish modern humans from their close relatives and which may have given us certain advantages over the course of evolution. For example, the catalogue includes differences in genes that code for functional elements, such as proteins, in which the Neanderthal versions are more like those of the chimpanzee than present-day humans. Some evolutionary changes were found in genes involved in cognitive development, skull structure, energy metabolism, skin morphology and wound healing.

This was done by identifying sites in the genome alignment where the human genome sequence which was decoded about ten years ago does not match that of chimpanzee, orangutan or rhesus macaque and are likely to have changed since the ancestor we shared with chimps and then comparing these to the Neanderthal DNA.

Two notable genes that emerged from the results are a gene influencing the pigmentation of the skin, and differences in genetic make-up that could affect aspects of energy metabolism how effectively mammoth steak is rendered into human action.

Another gene that differs is RUNX2. When affected in the Homo sapiens (that’s us!) it can cause a series of abnormalities, which can easily be associated with the Neanderthal physique: a bell-shaped rib cage, a more prominent cranial frontal bone and differences in the architecture of the shoulder joint. It is thus reasonable to assume that an evolutionary change in this gene was of importance to the origin of modern humans.

The Neanderthal in you

The study found Neanderthals are equally close to Europeans and East-Asians, but significantly closer to non-Africans than to Africans. The Neanderthal exchanged genes with ancestors of non-Africans, more particular, the researchers concluded that the gene flow was from Neanderthal into modern humans.

A 2009 study estimated the amount of non-African genomes affected by gene flow from ‘archaic’ hominids, including Neanderthals, to be 14%, however Pbo’s team claim that this figure is over-estimated. They conclude that between 1 to 4% of ‘Eurasian DNA’ is derived from Neanderthal.

Thus the genomic data seems to suggest that Neanderthals re-encountered anatomically modern humans, who began migrating out of Africa some 80,000 years ago. When we were leaving Africa in small pioneering groups, we must have encountered of the seventh kind a bunch of Neanderthals living in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, before the human population spread across East Asia.

These are preliminary data based on a very limited number of samples, so it is not clear how widely applicable these findings are to all populations. The findings do not change our basic understanding that humans originated in Africa and dispersed around the world in a migration out of that continent.

The study does stipulate that the actual amount of interbreeding between Neanderthal and modern humans may have been very limited, given that it only contributed to 1 to 4% of the genome of present-day non-Africans.

It was a very unique series of events, with a founding population of modern humans of greatly reduced size tens to hundreds of individuals, Jim Mullikin commented. Geneticists can detect a population constriction or bottleneck where certain genetic markers are concentrated; that only occurs when the population is small. At that time, Dr Mullikin continued, where the population was greatly reduced, the modern humans migrating out of Africa encountered Neanderthals and interbreeding occurred between the two groups, leaving an additional, but subtle, genetic signature in the out-of-Africa group of modern humans.

The researchers have not yet detected any signs that the DNA from modern humans can be found in the Neanderthal genome. Neither is it known whether a more systematic sampling of African populations will reveal the presence of Neanderthal DNA in some indigenous Africans.

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MEanderthal iPhone app – Morph yourself (and your friends) into a caveman!

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These are preliminary data based on a very limited number of samples, so it is not clear how widely applicable these findings are to all populations, said Vence Bonham. The findings do not change our basic understanding that humans originated in Africa and dispersed around the world in a migration out of that continent.

So nothing is ‘really’ certain, yet again. But don’t let that put you off: the methodology developed during these studies can also be applied to other challenging studies in paleontology and archaeology as well as other human forensics. And having overcome multiple technical challenges, the scholars look optimistically into the future: We will also decode the remaining parts of the Neanderthal genome and learn much more about ourselves and our closest relatives, said Svante Pbo.

This did lead to an entertaining challenge over the weekend: explaining all this over a pint, and accurately estimating the amount of Neanderthal (or other primitive hominins) DNA in the specimens of male Homo sapiens we observed or interacted with. The conclusion was that this study must still underestimate the amount of DNA the more primitive hominids have contributed, unless they did not take alcohol intoxication of said specimens into account. We’d also appreciate a heads up on any more research into a) if ‘addiction’ is mapped into our genes or rather a Pavlov effect (fruits beyond conservation date make me merry, so I’ll consume more) and b) spatial awareness, in particular, theoretically, whether a monkey can learn to beat a human at foosball?

Ancient Beauties: Neanderthal Make-up and the Medicinal Benefits of Cleopatra Eyes

The worlds of cosmetics and archaeology have recently collided over two unexpected discoveries. Over the course of the past week, researchers have discovered that Neanderthals used make-up and that Cleopatra‘s face paint was good for her eyes. Which fact is most surprising?

The first thing that springs to mind when thinking about Neanderthal man is definitely not refinement. Its more beard, dirt, animal skins, grunts and women carried by their hair. Like so many clichs depicted in classroom textbooks and carried on by Hollywood, this idea is probably far from the truth. Thanks to scientific research undertaken in Murcia, in the South of Spain, we now know that Neanderthals used a primitive form of make-up.

The discovery was made by a team lead by professor Joao Zilhao from Bristol University. With other archaeologists, he found yellow and red pigment residues in large shells dating back some 50,000 years. In other words, Neanderthals had their own version of your basic powder and compact (minus the mirror). Despite earlier discoveries of black sticks of manganese pigments, Zilhao considers the residues to be the first tangible proof that Neanderthals used body paints. The team also believes that the shells found are evidence of Neanderthal jewellery.

So, was Mrs Neanderthal making herself prettier before a hunting date with Mr Neanderthal? Aside from the fact that Mrs N. probably wasnt going hunting, there are other, more likely explanations for the use of pigments.

Anthropology tells us that make-up and more generally the application of colour on ones skin isnt always about vanity or beauty. It also carries symbols of power and strength and can be part of religious rituals. It can be the representation of links within a group or accompany the life of a community.

Until more discoveries are made, the real use and function of the pigments will not be known. For Zilhaos team however, the real importance of the finding is that it shows that neanderthals were capable of symbolic thinking. This idea was backed up by professor Chris Stringer, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, who told the BBC that these findings help to disprove the view that Neanderthals were dim-witted. Time to rethink the modern meaning of Neanderthal behaviour then.

On the other side of the Mediterranean, some thousand years after the Neanderthal, Cleopatra, Ptolemaic Egyptian ruler, was also quite fond of make-up. A joint French study by the Louvre museum and the CNRS, a national research centre, showed that in addition to being a sight for sore eyes, Cleopatras make-up was quite literally good for the eyes.

Cleopatra is often depicted in popular culture as having a heavy hand when it came to applying eye make-up. The French study showed that her black make-up was an effective protection against eye infections thanks to the presence of lead salts. When used at low levels, those salts produce nitric oxide, which boosts the immune system to fight off bacteria which can cause eye infection.

Scientists and archaeologists already knew that make-up had medicinal properties. Philippe Walter, who lead the research, told the BBC that his aim was to determine exactly how.

To do so, they used the good old experimenting method of recreating the make-up Cleopatra would have used. They then used a tiny electrode, 1/10th the thickness of a human hair, to look at the effect of lead chloride salt synthesised by the Egyptians – laurionite – on a single cell.

Ancient Egyptian make-up was protective on two counts: medical, as shown by Walter and team, but also holistic. Dynasty after dynasty, Egyptian eye make-up was made up of udju (green malachite) and mesdemet (dark grey stibnite or galena, now known as kohl). Galena has long been thought to protect against the sun, an invaluable property when you live in Egypt. Even more importantly, the application of eye make-up can be compared to a religious ritual since it was meant to protect against the Evil Eye.

Early Man Did Have Sex with Neanderthals

One of the world’s leading geneticists claims modern man and Neanderthals were more than mere neighbours thousands of years ago. Swedish expert Professor Svante Paabo, of the Max Planck Institution for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, is sure the two species had sex during their 10-12,000-year coexistence some 30,000 years ago.

Yet Paabo, who made the claim during a conference in New York, is unsure as yet whether the cross-copulating led to children – and whether those children would have been infertile, as is the case in the offspring of lions and tigers, or horses and zebras.

Prof. Paabo, named among the world’s most influential hundred people by TIME magazine in 2007, is hoping his questions will be answered by his forthcoming analysis of the Neanderthal genome.

Fossils containing DNA from both humans and Neanderthals have been found in

“Did we have children back then and did those children contribute to our variation today?”

recent years, leading many to concur with Prof. Paabo’s interbreeding theory. Yet studies of Neanderthal genes have thus far proved the pair’s genetic make-ups to be wildly different. Prof. Paabo hopes his work will provide an answer to this mystery.

“What I’m really interested in is, did we have children back then and did those children contribute to our variation today?” Prof. Paabo tells the Sunday Times. “I’m sure that they had sex, but did it give offspring that contributed to us? We will be able to answer quite vigorously with the new [Neanderthal genome] sequence.” His work is due to be published shortly. It’s not surprising Neanderthals found a taste for those outside their species if a recent paper from the University of Liverpool is to be believed: its experts claim Neanderthals lost out in the evolutionary war due to a seed-spreading sex obsession, rather than the monogamy of their human cousins.

Human Hatred of Sprouts ‘Evolutionary Mystery’

Who likes sprouts? Thought not, and now it seems we’ve got a solid excuse for our parents when they try to force the fetid, vile veg down our throats – we’ve been programmed to hate them since we were Neanderthals! A new study by the Spanish National Research Council claims to have debunked a mystery of evolution this week, by discovering a gene which makes us dislike a bitter taste common in some food. The gene, which causes an adverse reaction to phenylthiocarbamite – or PTC as it’s mercifully known – has been present in hominids for nearly 50,000 years. The findings follow the sequencing of 48,000 year-old Neanderthal bones at El Sidron, northern Spain. The researchers claim the gene is there to prevent us from eating other toxic plants which contain PTC, but they are mystified as to why the Neanderthals they studied possessed a recessive variant – meaning they wouldn’t have been able to detect the taste.

Prehistoric man may not have enjoyed sprouts, but he did enjoy a spot of cannibalism.

“This indicates that variation in bitter taste perception predates the divergence of the lineages leading to Neanderthals and modern humans,” says the team’s report, published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. “The sense of bitter taste protects us from ingesting toxic substances.” The recessive gene, however, has the team stumped: “This feature … is a mystery of evolution,” the report adds. “These (bitter) compounds can be toxic if ingested in large quantities, and it is therefore difficult to understand the evolutionary existence of individuals who cannot detect them.” The report gives modern man a unique look into his prehistoric past. And on a personal note it’s nice to think of Neanderthals spitting out sprouts in disgust, echoing the scene at Christmas dinner tables all over the world. There have been, however, some subtle changes in human diets over the years – only 9,000 years ago prehistoric Britons were tucking into succulent cuts of their own kind and a recent discovery on the Isle of Man suggests hazelnuts played an vital role in the diets of these cannibals’ contemporaries. Still, human and nuts or sprouts? Close call.

Image by Jane Hudson.

Neanderthal Found Swimming in North Sea

Scientists in the Netherlands have discovered a fragment of a Neanderthal man’s skull in the North Sea, dating back around 60,000 years. The Leiden-based boffins believe the find to be the first human remains ever dredged from the sea bed. Chemical isotope readings have shown the man to have been carniverous – and the area would certainly been rife with potential dinners in his day. For most of the past 500,000 years, the North Sea’s level has been sustantially lower, with many parts forming a sort of archipelago stretching from the British Isles to the European mainland.

‘Only a Matter of Time’

Thousands of mammal remains have been found in the region before, many of which date to the Cromerian period of between 866,000 and 478,000 years ago. Professor Chris Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, believes that, due to the large number of animals in the area, it was ‘only a matter of time’ until human equivalents were discovered.

“It would be great if we could get the technology one day to go down and search (in the sea floor) where we can obtain the dating, associated materials and other information we would get if we were excavating on land,” he added.

Neanderthal man is our ancestoral cousin, appearing on the European continent as long as 400,000 years ago – from Iberia to Siberia. Our own species, homo sapiens, evolved first in Africa. Scientists believe that the study of the North Sea bed is key to understanding the migratory systems of prehistoric Britain and Europe.”We have Neanderthals at Lynford (in Norfolk) 60,000 years ago, though we only have stone tools. This specimen might indeed be the kind of Neanderthal that was crossing into Norfolk around that time. It will help us understand our British sequence when we can much more precisely map what’s under the North Sea,” Professor Stringer argued.

Image by Erich Ferdinand.