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Guillaume Geurin, research scientist at Geosciences Rennes and PI of the QuinaWorld project And that’s essentially because we have radiocarbon to work on modern humans, but we don’t have it to study Neanderthals. Although we have found many tools and artefacts specific to Neanderthals, we don’t know which came first and which came later, and if the fauna they hunted evolved over time following clear patterns or not. When you look at Neanderthals, you have no map of their dispersal across Europe at a given time and you have little knowledge about their evolution. And that’s essentially because we have radiocarbon to work on modern humans, but we don’t have it to study Neanderthals.’ ‘Although we have found many tools and artefacts specific to Neanderthals, we don’t know which came first and which came later, and if the fauna they hunted evolved over time following clear patterns or not. ‘When you look at Neanderthals, you have no map of their dispersal across Europe at a given time and you have little knowledge about their evolution,’ explained Guérin. Until now, an obstacle to fully understanding the behaviours of Neanderthals is the fact that two critical parts of the equation have eluded scientists: time and space. New dating methods could revolutionise our understanding of Neanderthals ‘We can find rock art, sea-faring technology or evidence that suggests that Neanderthals were able to navigate, as well as evidence of burials and even long-distance interactions all of these actions that have been considered traits of modernity are present in the Neanderthal world to some degree,’ he said.
EARLIEST YEARS OF OUR SPECIES ARE LOST TO TIME HOW TO
The discovery that our ancestors knew how to use both stone and bone tools to cover a variety of needs opens up a whole new perspective on the richness and “modernity” of their technical systems.įor Guérin, “modernity” is best understood as a spectrum, rather than the sheer absence or presence of specific defining features. However, a new analytical method developed by Dr Baumann has uncovered a rich bone industry that can be attributed to both the Denisovans and the Neanderthals.
Dr Malvina Baumann of the University of Liege explains that the seeming lack of bone industry among the Neanderthals for many years was considered as a cognitive gap, another key difference that sets the modern human above the Neanderthal. Take the ability to fashion fully shaped objects out of bone material, for example.
‘But I think the more we look at these different criteria and trends that could be characteristic for modernity, actually there is not so much difference between the Neanderthals and modern humans.’ ‘It is widely accepted that there is a difference in terms of modernity between Neanderthals and modern humans,’ said Guillaume Guérin, research scientist at Geosciences Rennes. These discoveries are adding to the complexity of understanding why Neanderthals died out and the modern human survived if the differences between the two species were much smaller than previously assumed, what gave the modern human the competitive advantage over our ancient cousin? For a long time, paleoanthropologists viewed Neanderthals as being very distinct from our own species, and inherently incapable of sharing the “modern” characteristics that came to define our own evolution.Ī substantial and rapidly growing body of research is putting this “dumb brute” conception of the Neanderthal firmly to bed: there is evidence to show that they were a sea-faring people, skilled cooperative hunters, and possibly even capable of medical treatment and healthcare. It was a time when Europe and the Middle East were already populated by the Neanderthals, while the Denisovans spread across large parts of Asia.Įver since the discovery of the Neanderthal 1, the first specimen to be recognised as an early human fossil in 1856, researchers have been trying to figure out what brought about the extinction of earlier species of humans. Yet this was the reality 60,000 years ago, when the first anatomically modern humans left Africa. That’s a difficult picture to paint by any stretch of the imagination. Try to imagine the modern human, Homo Sapiens, as just one of three species of humans coexisting on the planet Earth.
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