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Neandertals, Hyenas Fought for Caves, Food, Study Says

Neandertals not only fought for their lives against hyenas and other large predators but also battled with them for caves and food.

That's the conclusion drawn by scientists who found a 41,000-year-old Neandertal leg bone in a European cave littered with bones. The bones had been gnawed on by large carnivores or showed the cut marks of stone tools—or both.

The debris provides evidence that Neandertals (also spelled Neanderthals) and large carnivores, mostly hyenas, both used the Les Rochers-de-Villeneuve cave in central western France for shelter ... National Geographic News

Neandertal femur suggests competition with hyenas and a shift in landscape use

Analysis of approximately 41,000-year-old human remains found in France suggests that Neandertals may have become regionally mobile earlier than scientists once thought ... EurekAlert!

Free trade may have finished off Neanderthals

Modern humans may have driven Neanderthals to extinction 30,000 years ago because Homo sapiens unlocked the secrets of free trade, say a group of US and Dutch economists. The theory could shed new light on the mysterious and sudden demise of the Neanderthals after over 260,000 years of healthy survival.

Anthropologists have considered a wide range of factors which may explain Neanderthal extinction, including biological, environmental and cultural causes. For example, one major study concluded that Neanderthals were less able to deal with plunging temperatures during the last glacial period ... New Scientist Breaking News

For Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, Was It De-Lovely?

The scientists did not get around to the nitty-gritty question until the fourth hour of a two-and-a-half-day symposium on Neanderthals, held recently at New York University.

A strong consensus was emerging, they agreed, that the now-extinct Neanderthals were a distinct evolutionary entity from modern humans, presumably a different species. They were archaic members of the human family, robust with heavy brow ridges and forward-projecting faces, who lived in Europe and western Asia from at least 250,000 years ago until they vanished from the fossil record about 28,000 years ago ... The New York Times

Warum starb der Neandertaler aus?

Mindestens 200 000 Jahre hatte er Zeit, sich an das raue Klima in Europa zu gewöhnen, dann verschwand er nahezu schlagartig. Das rätselhafte Aussterben des Neandertalers beschäftigt die Anthropologen nach wie vor.

Es war eine kulturelle Revolution: Statt grobschlächtig behauener Steine tauchten plötzlich effektive und fein verarbeitete Werkzeuge auf. Es entstand - nahezu aus dem Nichts - eine figurative Kunst auf erstaunlich hohem Niveau, wie die fantasievollen Fresken in der Höhle von Chauvet oder die filigranen Elfenbeinfigürchen von der Schwäbischen Alb auf eindrucksvolle Weise zeigen. Vor 35 000 Jahren brach in Europa die Kulturstufe des Aurignacien an und läutete damit die jüngere Altsteinzeit, das Jungpaläolithikum, ein ... spektrumdirekt

New Book: Acheulean Culture in Peninsular India: An Ecological Perspective

In the Foreword of this book, India's venerable prehistoric archaeologist, V. N. Misra, states that, "Palaeolithic studies in India have made ... tremendous progress during the last four decades" although he opines that an understanding of human evolution and behavior from the record is still "fragmentary" and "incomplete." In an attempt to indicate what has been learned about the Acheulean, Raghunath Pappu has summarized the available evidence from a multitude of surveys and excavations ... RedNova News

40,000-year-old axes unearthed in Syria

A Syrian archaeological team has uncovered two firestone axes dating back 35,000 to 40,000 years and some 6000 BCE stone arrowheads. Mission head Bassam Jamous said he had to dig one metre deep into al-Wadi's cave in western Syria to find the two 8 cm almond-shaped axes ... Stone Pages Archaeo News

Paleolithic Fast Food

To a cave-dwelling human 50,000 years ago, "fast food" meant just the opposite: something slow-moving and easy to catch. Now archaeologists have devised a clever way to extrapolate from the detritus of ancient meals a measure of prehistoric population size and its growth rate. Their findings suggest early human populations were much smaller than had previously been supposed ... www.harvard-magazine.com

Family words came first for early humans

One of a Neanderthal baby's first words was probably "papa", concludes one of the most comprehensive attempts to date to make out what the first human language was like.

Many of the estimated 6000 languages now spoken share common words and meanings, notably for kin names like "mama" and "papa". That has led some linguists to suggest that these words have been carried through from humans' original proto-language, spoken at least 50,000 years ago ... New Scientist

Archaeologists discover Neanderthal man's tooth

Archaeologists in Montenegro have discovered a tooth believed to belong to Neanderthal man dating back between 40,000 and 150,000 years, a museum official said on Saturday.

The tooth was found in Crvena Stijena (Red Cliff) and "belonged to Neanderthal man," Zvezdana Lucic, director of the museum in the north-western town of Niksic, told reporters ... ABC News