Study Boosts Neanderthal Into Human Family Tree : Science: New evidence shows links between brawny, brutish race and Moderns. ‘African Eve’ theory disputed.
The Neanderthal people, a brawny, brutish race that populated Europe and the Middle East until about 35,000 years ago, are the ancestors of modern-day Europeans and Americans and not the evolutionary dead-end that most anthropologists have thought them to be, researchers said Saturday.
New evidence reported here at a meeting of the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science shows strong biological links between the Neanderthals and modern Europeans.
Other evidence indicates that the Neanderthals had cultural and behavioral characteristics virtually identical to those of the early modern humans who lived in the region at the same time. “If they were living the same way and doing the same things (as early humans), then they were the same people,” said paleontologist Milford H. Wolpoff of the University of Michigan.
What Wolpoff termed “recent and very startling discoveries” fly in the face of genetic evidence that indicated that all modern peoples are descended from a single female who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago--the so-called “African Eve” or “Mother of Us All”-- and seem likely to stir new controversy over what is already a hotly debated subject.
Controversy about the place of Neanderthals in human history has consumed paleontologists since the first fossil bones from this period were discovered in Germany’s Neander Valley a century and a half ago.
The new fossils revealed early humans with protruding eyebrows, no chin and short, heavily muscled limbs. Because these features were so different from modern humans, as well as from early humans that lived about the same time, a consensus emerged that they were not on the main trunk of human evolution. Instead, they were a viewed as a branch, much like orangutans and other primates.
Unlike the primates, however, the Neanderthals did not survive to the present era, presumably because the more highly developed early humans out-competed them for limited resources.
The controversy was brought into sharp focus in the 1980s when molecular biologists, particularly the late Alan Wilson of UC Berkeley, developed highly controversial genetic evidence that established the concept of the African Eve. Those studies seemingly left no place for Neanderthals in human evolution.
But the genetic studies also changed the very nature of the debate by introducing a hypothesis that could be tested. If the African Eve theory is correct, then virtually no intermingling of Neanderthals and early modern humans can have occurred and no Neanderthal characteristics should be found in modern humans.
If such traits are found, said Wolpoff, then the African Eve theory is refuted. “That is the case,” he said Saturday.
Anthropologist Alan Mann of the University of Pennsylvania, for example, discussed new studies of teeth. Teeth play a very important role in anthropology because they are laid down at birth--and thus reflect only genetics, and not environment--and because they persist in the environment longer than bones.
Mann found “very interesting” microstructural differences in the enamel of teeth from modern Europeans and Africans. In contrast, he did not find the difference when he compared the teeth of modern Europeans and Neanderthals.
“If the African Eve is correct, then the Europeans should share their tooth structure with Africans (and not with Neanderthals),” Mann said. “That is not the case.”
Anthropologists Rachel Caspari of Albion College and David Frayer of the University of Kansas reported on recent developments in the study of cranial anatomy. Traditionally, researchers have drawn a sharp distinction between the cranial fossils of Neanderthals and modern humans, emphasizing the small chin and pronounced brow ridges of the former.
“There are clear temporal trends in reduction and lateral thinning within the Neanderthals toward the modern European condition that would not be expected if the Moderns were a new or different species,” Caspari said. “Similarly, the presence of a chin has long been considered a uniquely modern feature, (but) many Neanderthals share this trait.”
Anthropologist Fred H. Smith of Northern Illinois University reported on such similarities in other bones of Neanderthals and modern humans. These similarities indicate that there is “a continuity in defining characteristics” that indicate Neanderthals are direct human ancestors, Caspari said.
Cultural similarities between the two groups also support a continuity. Mann reported on the discovery of a small piece of 70,000-year-old Neanderthal skull from a cave in Croatia. The skull fragment showed evidence of an “enormous, very severe skull injury” that the individual must have survived because the skull had time to heal.
But such an injury would have been very debilitating, so that the individual must have been cared for by his or her cohorts--a trait that has not been associated with Neanderthals. “They must have had a much more complex behavioral base than we might have thought about otherwise,” Mann said.
Other cultural evidence reported by anthropologist Anne-Marie Tillier of the University of Bordeaux in France support this point of view. She noted that the Neanderthals had complex burial rituals similar to those of the first modern humans. She also found no evidence that Neanderthal children had an accelerated childhood, as has been postulated by those who favor the idea that Neanderthals are a separate species.
No one who favors the African Eve theory was on the AAAS program organized by Wolpoff and Mann. One of its leading proponents, paleontologist Christopher Springer of the British Museum in London, was invited, Wolpoff said, “but he didn’t come.”
But some potentially informative data appeared Friday in the journal Science. A reanalysis of the data from which the African Eve theory was derived suggests that a key computer program was misapplied by Wilson and his successors.
The reanalysis by researchers at Harvard University, Washington University and Pennsylvania State University suggests that Eve could have come from either Africa or Asia or--more disturbing to the molecular biologists--that there could have been more than one Eve.
“We’re not saying . . . that (the origin) is definitely non-African, but rather that you can’t tell,” said Harvard anthropologist Maryellen Ruvolo. In other words, many of our genes could be Neanderthal.
Clearly, the debate about the historical position of the Neanderthals is going to continue for some time.
