Excerpt from the National Geographic’s Genographic Project:
“When our ancestors first migrated out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, they were not alone. At least two of our hominid cousins had made the same journey—Neanderthals and Denisovans. Neanderthals, the better known of the two species, left Africa about 300,000 years ago and settled in Europe and parts of western Asia. The Denisovans are a much more recent addition to the human family tree. In 2008, paleoanthropologists digging in a cave in southern Siberia unearthed a 40,000-year-old adult tooth and an exquisitely preserved fossilized pinkie bone that had belonged to a young girl who was between five and seven years old when she died.
“Recently, scientists successfully extracted nuclear DNA from the pinkie bone and conducted comparison studies with the genomes of modern humans and Neanderthals. Studies show the girl was closely related to Neanderthals, yet distinct enough to merit classification as a new species of archaic humans, which scientists named “Denisovan” after the cave where the pinkie bone was found. The Denisovan genome also suggests the young girl had brown hair, eyes, and skin…
“According to one theory, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans are all descended from the ancient human Homo heidelbergensis. Between 300,000 to 400,000 years ago, an ancestral group of H. heidelbergensis left Africa and then split shortly after. One branch ventured northwestward into West Asia and Europe and became the Neanderthals. The other branch moved east, becoming Denisovans. By 130,000 years ago, H. heidelbergensis in Africa had become Homo sapiens—our ancestors—who did not begin their own exodus from Africa until about 60,000 years ago.” (Project, Genographic)
When the geologist, William King, first discovered the strange skull with heavy brow ridges in the Neander Valley of Germany in 1864, he pronounced the species a “brute”. Thus, from the beginning “Neanderthal” became a pejorative word meaning stupid, brutish, and inferior.
Now over 155 years later, we know that Neanderthals were far more advanced than originally conceived. Their cranial capacity was larger than that of modern humans. Moreover, they made tools and fire, were adept hunters, and were the first known species to bury their dead. They were also the first known artists, leaving abstract images of disks, stencil dots, hashtags, as well as depictions of wooly mammoths, rhinos, and other Ice Age megafauna in Spanish and French cave paintings.
As to interbreeding, Science Magazine reported:
“Researchers already knew that living people from a vast area spanning the Philippines and New Guinea to China and Tibet have inherited 3% to 5% of their DNA from Denisovans. The leading scenario had suggested that as modern humans swept out of Africa, they first encountered Neanderthals and mated with them; hence, all people in Europe and Asia now have 1% to 3% of their DNA from Neanderthals. The ancestors of Asians then encountered Denisovans 50,000 years ago or so and acquired 3% to 5% of their DNA from them.” (Gibbons, 2019)
Not only did all three species co-exist for thousands of years, but there was obviously no genetic barrier that prevented interbreeding. In 2016 Nature published the results of paleogeneticist Vivian Stone’s DNA analysis of a bone discovered in the Denisova Cave in Siberia. The results: the bone belonged to a 13-year-old girl whose mother was a Neanderthal and whose father was a Denisovan.
Pleistocene caves have been called the singles bars of Ice Age hominins. There must have been a lot of cold, lonely nights under the stalactites. (to be continued in next post)