Neanderthal Man is… Us!

NEANDERTALS LIVE! from Assoc. Prof. John Hawks’ weblog.

John Hawks discusses how Neanderthals have survived to the present day, as recently revealed by their sequenced genomes. More interestingly it means the Neanderthals were the same species as Homo sapiens – they really were Homo sapiens neanderthalis, a sub-species variant, as a lot of older paleoanthropologists insisted c.30-40 years ago. We didn’t evolve from them, but they have contributed genes to our common humanity. All us non-Africans, and probably many living Africans, owe them a debt of ancestry. Our expanding population of African-originated variant Homo swallowed up the smaller population of regional variants that was ‘Neanderthal Man’, some 50-40,000 years ago…