There's a great article in this month's National Geographic about Neanderthals. And I don't want to see any comments from "anonymous" talking about how this is a boring post, ok, Matt?
- They dominated Europe for 200,000 years, far longer than modern man has been around.
- 45,000 - 30,000 years ago, the Neanderthals shared Europe with modern man, coming out of Africa around 60,000 years ago. No no one knows why the Neanderthals went extinct, or whether the transition to modern man was peaceful.
- Neanderthals needed about 5,000 calories a day, around the same required by a participant in the Tour de France, as opposed to the normal 2,200 calories that we require.
- They do not believe that modern man descended from Neanderthals, but that they both descended from a common ancestor 700,000 years ago. There may have been some interbreeding, but too minimal to tell.
- Humans share 98.7% of the same genetic material as chimpanzees. The connection between modern man and Neanderthals was much closer.
- Neanderthals did not have the pointy chins that we have.
- All of the Neanderthal remains that have been found show signs of cannibalism, such as marks from stones, most likely from scraping.
- The total number of Neanderthals probably never exceeded more than 15,000 at a time.
- They were short, about 5 feet tall, to conserve heat, and had big rib cages to support large lungs, great for vigorous exercise. Their large muscles were leveraged for maximum strength.
- Neanderthals may have had the same vocal hardware as modern man, but know one knows for sure.
- Neanderthals may have reached maturity several years before we do, which probably significantly affected their social organization.
- They ate mostly meat. Modern man's ability to distribute the labor to survive on both hunting and agriculture may explain their success.
- They've found a gene in certain fossils that shows red hair and pale skin, leading to this recreation. The pale skin let in more sunlight to manufacture vitamin D. To see how they came up with the recreation, check this out:
7 comments:
This is not Matt, and that was a totally boring post.
Heeeeey... You changed your commenting format!
I didn't find this boring! Then again, I watch Nova. Also, I thought I read something recently about how Neanderthals might not have actually gone extinct after all... But that may have just been a joke at the expense of someone with a really protruding supraorbital ridge.
I tell the best stories!
p.s. This new format is confusing and sucks.
I did? Seems the same to me. Maybe it's you who needs to have your supraorbitral ridge checked out! HA HA ha ha....oh, boy.
commenting format is the same for me too, maybe it was a temporary blogger thing...
well, you guys succeeded in making the comments more boring than the post, which was quite a feat.
brian, these people don't understand.
I can't write anything here without sounding like a dweeb, but let's just say that the whole Neanderthal thing is pretty awesome.
What's really cool is the artwork. Modern humans were drawing symbolic images much sooner than us, us though they were here longer. They only did it after we came along.
They dominated. They were stronger and better adapted to the cold. Global warming killed them. That, or we made them go extinct.
Awesome.
It may have been a blogger thing, yeah, Nil. Seems back to normal to me now, too.
Post a Comment