scholarly journals Sequencing the Neanderthalgenome: Mummy? Daddy?

2007 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 36-38
Author(s):  
Subhajyoti De

The Neanderthals were a hominoid species that became extinct in Europe soon after the anatomically modern humans had migrated there from Africa around 28000–40000 years ago. The sequencing of the Neanderthal genome has begun, and it is hoped to find out whether any gene was transferred from the Neanderthals to modern humans and to identify very recent changes in the human genome that have functional consequences. The results will have great significance for the biological understanding of human evolution and for technological progress in genomics.

2002 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 494-498 ◽  
Author(s):  
Konstantin Khodosevich ◽  
Yuri Lebedev ◽  
Eugene Sverdlov

Humans share about 99% of their genomic DNA with chimpanzees and bonobos; thus, the differences between these species are unlikely to be in gene content but could be caused by inherited changes in regulatory systems. Endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) comprise ∼ 5% of the human genome. The LTRs of ERVs contain many regulatory sequences, such as promoters, enhancers, polyadenylation signals and factor-binding sites. Thus, they can influence the expression of nearby human genes. All known human-specific LTRs belong to the HERV-K (human ERV) family, the most active family in the human genome. It is likely that some of these ERVs could have integrated into regulatory regions of the human genome, and therefore could have had an impact on the expression of adjacent genes, which have consequently contributed to human evolution. This review discusses possible functional consequences of ERV integration in active coding regions.


Author(s):  
Almudena Villar Calvo ◽  
Susana Rubio Jara ◽  
Pablo J. Morales Grajera ◽  
Juan Antonio Martos Romeno ◽  
Marta Giménez la Rosa ◽  
...  

RESEÑA 1 de : Kuhn, Steven L.. Mousterian Lithic Technology. An Ecological Perspective. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1995.RESEÑA 2 de : Politis, Gustavo G. Nukak. Colombia : Instituto Amazónico de Investigaciones Científicas (SINCHI), 1996.RESEÑA 3 de : Carbonell, Eudald; Vaquero, Manuel. The last neandertals, the first anatomically modern humans : a tale about the human diversity. Cultural change and human evolution : the crisis at 40 KA BP. Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 1996.RESEÑA 4 de : Moure Romanillo, Alfonso. El hombre fósil : 80 años después. Santander : Universidad de Cantabria, Fundación Marcelino Botín, Institute For Preliistoric Investigations, 1996.RESEÑA 5 de : Lori, Hager. Women in Human Evolution. Londres y Nueva York : Routledge, 1997.RESEÑA 6 de : Mither, Steven. Arqueología de la Mente. Orígenes del arte, de la religión y de la ciencia. Barcelona : Ed. Crítica (Grijalbo Mondadori), 1998.RESEÑA 7 de : Arzuaga, J.L.; Martínez, I. La especie elegida : la larga marcha de la evolución humana. Ed. Temas de Hoy, 1998.


Author(s):  
Elisabeth V. Culley ◽  
Iain Davidson

This chapter addresses questions about the emergence of art, sign, and representation, showing what these categories mean as applied to the archaeological record and how evidence of them may relate to the evolution of human cognitive capacities. It goes beyond the Eurasian Upper Paleolithic to consider marked or decorated objects from significantly older sites associated with Anatomically Modern Humans in Africa and Indonesia, Neanderthals in Europe, and Homo erectus in Trinil, Java. The materials evidence a range of graphic production across significant space and time. They indicate the emergence of graphic expression and its role in human evolution is much more complex than traditional Eurocentric model, as well as more recent models, allow. The review points to problems with the current epistemology of symbolic evolution and emphasizes how the use of “art” and other traditional artifact classes bias interpretations of prehistoric behaviors and models of when and why symbolling emerged.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey J. A. Bradshaw ◽  
Kasih Norman ◽  
Sean Ulm ◽  
Alan N. Williams ◽  
Chris Clarkson ◽  
...  

AbstractThe peopling of Sahul (the combined continent of Australia and New Guinea) represents the earliest continental migration and settlement event of solely anatomically modern humans, but its patterns and ecological drivers remain largely conceptual in the current literature. We present an advanced stochastic-ecological model to test the relative support for scenarios describing where and when the first humans entered Sahul, and their most probable routes of early settlement. The model supports a dominant entry via the northwest Sahul Shelf first, potentially followed by a second entry through New Guinea, with initial entry most consistent with 50,000 or 75,000 years ago based on comparison with bias-corrected archaeological map layers. The model’s emergent properties predict that peopling of the entire continent occurred rapidly across all ecological environments within 156–208 human generations (4368–5599 years) and at a plausible rate of 0.71–0.92 km year−1. More broadly, our methods and approaches can readily inform other global migration debates, with results supporting an exit of anatomically modern humans from Africa 63,000–90,000 years ago, and the peopling of Eurasia in as little as 12,000–15,000 years via inland routes.


2003 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 263-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lewis-Williams ◽  
E. Thomas Lawson ◽  
Knut Helskog ◽  
David S. Whitley ◽  
Paul Mellars

David Lewis-Williams is well-known in rock-art circles as the author of a series of articles drawing on ethnographic material and shamanism (notably connected with the San rock art of southern Africa) to gain new insights into the Palaeolithic cave art of western Europe. Some 15 years ago, with Thomas Dowson, he proposed that Palaeolithic art owed its inspiration at least in part to trance experiences (altered states of consciousness) associated with shamanistic practices. Since that article appeared, the shamanistic hypothesis has both been widely adopted and developed in the study of different rock-art traditions, and has become the subject of lively and sometimes heated controversy. In the present volume, Lewis-Williams takes the argument further, and combines the shamanistic hypothesis with an interpretation of the development of human consciousness. He thus enters another contentious area of archaeological debate, seeking to understand west European cave art in the context of (and as a marker of) the new intellectual capacities of anatomically modern humans. Radiocarbon dates for the earliest west European cave art now place it contemporary with the demise of the Neanderthals around 30,000 years ago, and cave art, along with carved or decorated portable items, appears to announce the arrival and denote the success of modern humans in this region. Lewis-Williams argues that such cave art would have been beyond the capabilities of Neanderthals, and that this kind of artistic ability is unique to anatomically modern humans. Furthermore, he concludes that the development of the new ability cannot have been the product of hundreds of thousands of years of gradual hominid evolution, but must have arisen much more abruptly, within the novel neurological structure of anatomically modern humans. The Mind in the Cave is thus the product of two hypotheses, both of them contentious — the shamanistic interpretation of west European Upper Palaeolithic cave art, and the cognitive separation of modern humans and Neanderthals. But is it as simple as that? Was cave art the hallmark of a new cognitive ability and social consciousness that were beyond the reach of previous hominids? And is shamanism an outgrowth of the hard-wired structure of the modern human brain? We begin this Review Feature with a brief summary by David Lewis-Williams of the book's principal arguments. There follows a series of comments addressing both the meaning of the west European cave art, and its wider relevance for the understanding of the Neanderthal/modern human transition.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibylle Wolf ◽  
Nicholas J. Conard ◽  
Harald Floss ◽  
Rimtautas Dapschauskas ◽  
Elizabeth Velliky ◽  
...  

Abstract While the earliest evidence for ochre use is very sparse, the habitual use of ochre by hominins appeared about 140,000 years ago and accompanied them ever since. Here, we present an overview of archaeological sites in southwestern Germany, which yielded remains of ochre. We focus on the artifacts belonging exclusively to anatomically modern humans who were the inhabitants of the cave sites in the Swabian Jura during the Upper Paleolithic. The painted limestones from the Magdalenian layers of Hohle Fels Cave are a particular focus. We present these artifacts in detail and argue that they represent the beginning of a tradition of painting in Central Europe.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Montinaro ◽  
Vasili Pankratov ◽  
Burak Yelmen ◽  
Luca Pagani ◽  
Mayukh Mondal

AbstractAnatomically modern humans evolved around 300 thousand years ago in Africa1. Modern humans started to appear in the fossil record outside of Africa about 100 thousand years ago though other hominins existed throughout Eurasia much earlier2–4. Recently, several researchers argued in favour of a single out of Africa event for modern humans based on whole-genome sequences analyses5–7. However, the single out of Africa model is in contrast with some of the findings from fossil records, which supports two out of Africa8,9, and uniparental data, which proposes back to Africa movement10,11. Here, we used a novel deep learning approach coupled with Approximate Bayesian Computation and Sequential Monte Carlo to revisit these hypotheses from the whole genome sequence perspective. Our results support the back to Africa model over other alternatives. We estimated that there are two successive splits between Africa and out of African populations happening around 60-80 thousand years ago and separated by 12-13 thousand years. One of the populations resulting from the more recent split has to a large extent replaced the older West African population while the other one has founded the out of Africa populations.


Author(s):  
Lesley Newson ◽  
Peter Richerson

It’s time for a new story of our origins. One reason is that there a great deal of new evidence about what humans are like and the conditions that shaped human evolution. Another is that the thinking on human evolution has shifted. Evolutionists recognize that humans are very different from other animals, and they have been working to explain the different evolutionary path that humans took. There are still many gaps in the story, but this book describes seven points in our ancestors’ tale and explains the evidence behind these descriptions. The story begins seven million years ago, with the life of our ape ancestors, which were also the ancestors of today’s chimpanzees and bonobos. The second point is three million years ago with an ape that walked upright and lived outside the forest. Then follows a description of the life of early humans who lived one and a half million years ago. At the fourth point, 100,000 years ago, humans lived in Africa who were physically very similar to modern humans. The fifth is 30,000 years ago, during the last ice age, when our ancestors had evolved more complex cultures. The sixth is the period of accelerating cultural evolution that began as the planet started to recover from this ice age. Finally, beginning in the 1700s, there is the transformational period we are in now, which we call “modern times.” The style of this book is unusual for a science book because it has narrative sections that illustrate the lives of our ancestors and the problems they faced.


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