Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Neanderthals became extinct around 40,000 years ago. Hypotheses on the causes of the extinction include violence, transmission of diseases from modern humans which Neanderthals had no immunity to, competitive replacement, extinction by interbreeding with early modern human populations, natural catastrophes, climate change and inbreeding depression.
The culture that has been connected with the wave of extinctions in North America is the paleo-American culture associated with the Clovis people (q.v.), who were thought to use spear throwers to kill large animals. The chief criticism of the "prehistoric overkill hypothesis" has been that the human population at the time was too small and/or ...
The study found that humans left Africa, encountered and interbred with Neanderthals in three waves: One about 200,000 to 250,000 years ago, not long after the very first Homo sapiens fossils ...
The discoveries could bring scientists closer to understanding why Neanderthals ultimately died out and what role humans played in their demise.
Conversely, significant rates of modern human gene flow into Neanderthals occurred—of the three examined lineages—for only the Altai Neanderthal (0.1–2.1%), suggesting that modern human gene flow into Neanderthals mainly took place after the separation of the Altai Neanderthals from the El Sidrón and Vindija Neanderthals that occurred ...
The Neanderthal DNA found in modern human genomes has long raised questions about ancient interbreeding. New studies offer a timeline of when that occurred and when ancient humans left Africa.
The 1912 'discovery' of Piltdown Man (a hoax), appearing much more similar to modern humans than Neanderthals, was used as evidence that multiple different and unrelated branches of primitive humans existed, and supported Boule's reconstruction of H. neanderthalensis as a far distant relative and an evolutionary dead-end.
Recent fossil evidence indicates modern humans (Homo sapiens) and Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) may have co-existed in Europe for as long as 5,000 to 6,000 years before Neanderthals became ...