Beauty—of a sort—beat out brains among Neanderthals, report researchers analyzing a 430,000-year-old cache of skulls collected from the “Pit of Bones” cave site in Spain.
The Neanderthals were a prehistoric species of early humans, famously stumpy looking, thick boned, and big nosed, who lived in Europe and western Asia before disappearing from the fossil record by about 28,000 years ago. (Related: “Neanderthals … They’re Just Like Us?”)
The 17 skulls discovered in Spain’s Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones) cave and reported in the journal Science show that early Neanderthals sported their telltale “beetle brows” and heavy jaws about 430,000 years ago, long before they evolved Neanderthal features in their crania, including larger brains.
“These are the earliest Neanderthals,” says study leader Juan Luis Arsuaga at the Centro Mixto UCM-ISCIII de Evolución y Comportamiento Humanos in Madrid. “They can tell us a great deal about the evolution of Neanderthals, and by comparison, about modern humans.”
The new study adds to evidence that the Neanderthals developed their characteristic looks slowly, and patchily, over hundreds of thousands of years, Arsuaga says. The ancient world likely was filled with a potpourri of archaic humans that included these early Neanderthals, he suggests, their numbers waxing and waning between ancient ice ages that arrived every hundred thousand years or so.
“What I have been telling people is that it was like Game of Thrones,” says Arsuaga, referring to the popular fantasy book and cable television series. “There were a few spread-out populations, some related, some not, emigrating or going extinct over time. And winter was always coming.”
Source: National Geographic
