About 41,000 years ago, the last Neanderthal man breathed his last. At that moment, we became the only surviving humans, the only survivors of a once diverse group of bipedal apes.
Although we don't know exactly when or where this momentous event occurred, we do know that Neanderthals became extinct suspiciously close to the time that modern humans reached their territory. The exact reason they disappeared has long been hotly debated, but a surprising discovery from the last Neanderthal genome hidden in a remarkable cave in France sheds light on these first encounters and what came next. A detailed description of what happened is now being painted.
“This is a major turning point in our understanding of Neanderthals and their extinction process,” he says. Ludovic Slimak At the Center for Human Biology and Genomics, Toulouse, France.
our seeds, homo sapiensand Neanderthals share a common ancestor, but Neanderthals diverged from our lineage at least 400,000 years ago and evolved in Eurasia from the Mediterranean to Siberia. Our species is more recent, first appearing in Africa about 300,000 years ago and evolving into hominids anatomically similar to us by at least 195,000 years ago. Modern humans were thought to have left the continent in waves about 170,000 years ago, arriving in Western Europe about 43,000 years ago.
Source: www.newscientist.com
