‘Earliest known’ - 140,000-year-old Neanderthal find stuns the world
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A Palestinian family 140,000 years ago would sometimes consist of a Neanderthal father, Homo sapiens mother – and a hybrid child.
It was supposed to be impossible. But the evidence just keeps mounting. A 140,000-year-old child’s skull discovered in Israel has been identified as yet another human-Neanderthal hybrid.
It wasn’t that everyone thought Neanderthals were beastly, apelike people. We now know they were light-haired, barrel-chested and cultured.
It wasn’t that everyone thought (mostly hairless) primitive human females were more into chins than protruding eyebrows.
It was that they belonged to different species.
And different species were supposed to be genetically incompatible.
The skull itself was uncovered in an excavation of Israel’s Skhul Cave about 90 years ago. And its true significance went unnoticed as it sat for decades in a university storage vault.
It was identified and classified according to the best of 1932 scientific understanding.
It clearly belonged to a 5-year-old child.
Its cranium shape and size were obviously Homo sapiens (our ancestors).
But its lower jaw seemed Neanderthal (brutish ape-man).
This threw something of a monkey wrench into the thinking of anthropologists at the time. And the best solution they could come up with was to categorise it as a new species: Palaeoanthropus palestinus, or “little palestinus”.
But every time the child’s skull was reviewed, the same question posed itself:
Isn’t that half human, half Neanderthal?
A new research paper published this week in the science journal Anthropologie took a fresh look at the skull. And it has determined the child was a first-generation hybrid.
“The fossil we studied is the earliest known physical evidence of mating between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens,” says Professor Israel Hershkovitz of Tel Aviv University.
Evolutionary boiling pot
Modern anthropology has identified some Homo sapiens genes entering Neanderthal populations about 250,000 years ago. And they thought the first appearance of Neanderthal genes in Homo sapiens came 222,000 years later. That was based on the 1998 discovery of a hybrid skeleton, the “Lapedo Valley Child,” in Portugal dating from about 28,000 years ago.
That’s now changed.
At 140,000 years old, the Skhul skull is now the oldest known example. Five other skeletons were found in the Skhul cave. Several of those also appear to have been hybrids, the researchers say.
The Eastern Mediterranean, at this time, was a lush landscape. Drought, along with centuries of cultivation and war, has since turned it into a vast desert.
The hills between Syria in the north and Gaza in the south were filled with deer, horses, hippopotami and crocodiles. Early hominids, called Nesher Ramla Men, found it to be an ideal rest-stop.
“We show there was a local group of pre-Neanderthals, or Neanderthal-like hominins, who originated in Africa perhaps half a million years ago and evolved here,” says Professor Hershkovitz. “They were the indigenous people.”
This group lived in the Levant between 500,000 and 200,000 years ago.
But the Middle East was an ancient crossroads.
Evidence suggests hominids strolled out of Africa and into Eurasia, eventually evolving into Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east. Those remaining in Africa, it is speculated, may also have evolved into another form – Species X.
But that traffic never entirely stopped.
It was a three-way street.
Thus, the interaction – and intercourse – between Neanderthal and Homo sapiens.
As a result, the Holy Land became an evolutionary hotspot.
“There was something about them,” Professor Hershkovitz told Israeli media. “They seem to have always stirred our passions.”
Kissing cousins
When humans and Neanderthals met, the humans had something to offer.
Neanderthals weren’t stupid. They were tool makers. And there is increasing evidence they lived in organised groups capable of art and ritual.
Humans just had more of it. The researchers say their return migration brought new stone manufacturing technology, which the local Neanderthals were keen to embrace.
This presents a problem to anthropologists. They can no longer confidently state “Neanderthals” or “humans” lived here based on their rubbish tips.
Only bones can reveal who lived where, when.
When it comes to the Skhul skull, modern scanning technology added its inner ear and cranial blood network to the list of Neanderthal-like features.
And that exposes a scandalous story.
“Not only didn’t the other species disappear, in Israel they co-operated and coexisted for 100,000 years,” Hershkovitz states.
This involved cultural relationships. Technological exchange. And romantic entanglements.
Hershkovitz believes that, eventually, humans out-evolved their cousins.
We “domesticated” ourselves. As groups grew larger, relationships tended to favour more amenable and cooperative partners. And theirs were the genes that got passed down. Including those that came from Neanderthals.
The problem for anthropologists is that the ancient term species does not have an exact set of boundaries. But it was long accepted as a physically identifiable group unable to interbreed with other similar groups.
That doesn’t now make Neanderthals the same species as humans.
Instead, they clearly have a limited degree of overlap.
Current understanding suggests male hybrids were sterile. But female hybrids were able to conceive children and pass their mixed genes down through subsequent generations.
The march of time
Whatever the cause, Neanderthals and Denisovans were not as successful in adapting to a changing world.
But Professor Hershkovitz says humans shouldn’t be accused of genocide.
No signs of violence have been found on the bodies of any species in the area. There are no mass graves. Nor are there caches of stone age clubs, spears and axes.
Instead, separate research – also released this week – suggests a protein that helps generate DNA mutated and became humanity’s secret weapon.
The enzyme ADSL (adenylosuccinate lyase) helps synthesise purine, a vital component of DNA and other active molecules. But it’s different in Neanderthals and Denisovans. And genetic experiments may have revealed what that means.
“It might have given us some evolutionary advantage in particular tasks relative to ancestral humans,” says researcher Xiangchun Ju of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.
The human variant ADSL has a more efficient production line. And that translated into improved effectiveness in locating and managing scarce resources among female mice. But not males.
It’s unclear why only female mice seemed to gain a competitive advantage,” study co-author Izumi Fukunaga said in a statement. “Behaviour is complex.”
Eventually, even Homo sapiens abandoned Palestine as it became increasingly barren.
About 80,000 years ago, burials ceased and camps were emptied. The local hippo populations died out, and the forests retreated into a few scattered gulleys.
It took another 20,000 years before fresh waves of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals moved back out of Europe and Africa.
