Human Killed Neanderthal, Weapons Test Shows

A Neanderthal man who lived as recently as 50,000 years ago may have been killed by a modern human armed with an advanced projectile weapon, a new study suggests.

If confirmed, the Paleolithic "murder" would be the first compelling case for an anatomically modern human using a weapon against a member of the extinct human species.

The Neanderthal, dubbed Shanidar 3, was discovered in an Iraqi cave in 1959. His remains show that he likely died of a clean wound to his left side that nicked one rib but left the others relatively unharmed.

"People have been speculating about this injury for about 50 years," said study leader Steven Churchill of Duke University in North Carolina.

Experts have suggested that the Neanderthal may have fallen on his own spear, been fatally poked by a fellow hunter—or been killed by a projectile weapon, which only modern humans were known to use.

National Georgraphic News

Cane and Abel, one was a neanderthal, the other human. lol.

Maybe humans ate neanderthals.

I mean what would you think if you saw this neanderthal coming at you. And you had acquired a spear. Darn right. That neanderthal is going down!

Kudos to him.

Originally posted by Republican08
Cane and Abel, one was a neanderthal, the other human. lol.
...

Very interesting interpretation.

You think oral history could have carried the Modern/Neanderthal conflict across the approximately 30,000 years necessary?

I don't really see any problem with that happening and being used as the prototype for the entire good/evil mythic motif. And from there to bearing on the whole "why is there death" question is not much of a leap in art.

reply to post by rnaa


After 1,000s of years since the incident, and trying to understand why you are aware of yourself, and why the ground shakes, and why your buddy, mmmhmmmh just got hit by a bolt of fire from the sky.

Well alot of interpretation. These people back then must of been scared out of their mind.

Animals can feel compassion, but Humans can know they feel compassion, and think about it, and other things, imagine having these bizarre tools!

It would probably be the worst time ever to be alive.

Luckily we made it pretty far, brains Couldn't of done it without em.

I remember playing 'Telephone' in kindergarten or whatever. And well their was the mis hearing, or someone had a lisp and it was understood as a different word, and at the end of the chain of whispers the teacher asked the kid what he heard.

And the kid would say, all chickens, fox, boxers, and kittens die.

When the original phrase was, Most chickens are eaten by foxes.

Yeah. Now in the middle of it, their was always one joker, that would completely lie, to be funny.

That is in school children, I can only imagine, in millenia of time. Only Imagine.

Why do we think the human murderd the neanderthal, maybe our ancestor was defending him self from a hostile neanderthal tribe, maybe neanderthals were hostile against our ancestors ( neanderthals were more musculer and physiclay stronger than humans) and fought with them for hunting grounds and fresh water

reply to post by Lucifersjester


lol yeah because humans are normaly so totally alturistic and peaceful. You could argue thats it built into our most basic being to accept and help those that are differnt to us. The current living humans are definately decendents of the most peacful, relaxed forfathers.

Man, i LOVE backwards day!

lol but seriously, odds are we raped, killed and ate as many of them as we could, ha we probably didn't even care about the order of events either!

Except that Neanderthal man was human. Despite early attempts to classify Neanderthal remains as primitive precursors of modern man, we now know he was fully human, and there is strong indications he interbred with his contemporary, Cro-magon man.

All of us may be carrying some Neanderthal genes, so lets not rush to judge him as inferior.

Mike

can the Bigfoot (plural) be the last remnants of the Neanderthal race who somehow survived till today?

reply to post by Picollo30



No,
Bigfoot is most likely a much earlier subspecies that is related to both our and neanderthals distant ancestors.

reply to post by Scooby Doo


After reading Colin Wilson's "Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals", I learned much about the early human species. They were much more intelligent than we gave them credit for. Us "modern" humans lived side by side with them for over one hundred thousand years peacefully.

There is so much we do not know about our cousins of the past, and we always assume they are the brutes. How many wars did the Neanderthals have? So far, no battlegrounds of the Neanderthals have been found (although they do find fossils of dinosaurs fighting).

Originally posted by kidflash2008
reply to post by Scooby Doo

 

After reading Colin Wilson's "Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals", I learned much about the early human species. They were much more intelligent than we gave them credit for. Us "modern" humans lived side by side with them for over one hundred thousand years peacefully.

There is so much we do not know about our cousins of the past, and we always assume they are the brutes. How many wars did the Neanderthals have? So far, no battlegrounds of the Neanderthals have been found (although they do find fossils of dinosaurs fighting).

I used to read everything Colin Wilson wrote. He got flakier as time went on, but still lots of solid insights from him.

He got a lot of information from fellow British writer and psychologist Stan Gooch. Gooch has written the definitive researches on Neanderthal Man. His most recent "Neanderthal Legacy" fills in a lot of missing gaps in the development of modern man.

Neanderthal man was fully human, cultured and not the cartoonish brute depicted in literature. He didn't so much disappear as become absorbed by interbreeding with his contemporaries.

Gooch's theories were considered radical when he first published them in the early 70s. He is being vindicated as more and more hybrid skulls and skeletons are showing up in Europe.

www.reviewscout.com...

The Neanderthal Legacy is a fine synopsis on Gooch's life long work concerning the prehistoric existence of the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon peoples and the consequences of their encounter in Europe 35, 000 years BP (before present). Stan Gooch's past pronouncements that Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon interbred resulting in the dynamic but unstable `hybrid vigour' of modern people have been validated by continued evidence from various sources; but this common sense scenario has been stubbornly rejected by Orthodox science.

Gooch on the other hand has consistently offered multi-faceted evidence from not just anthropology, but also modern physiology and the psychology of a wide range of myths and legends and from history itself, that indicates not only the fusion of two dramatically different strains of genes but also the wholesale subjugation of Neanderthal's matriarchal empire; the Christian devil for example is none other than Neanderthal. This violent repression of Neanderthal by Cro-Magnon has an all too eerie familiarity about it that makes joining the dots a relatively simple task (the manic and almost successful attempt by the Nazis to eradicate Jews, Gypsies and Slavs), but Gooch's insights are extraordinarily plentiful; for example, the enlarged head of present day babies brought about by the cross breeding is the only part of the body that seems to be an unnatural size for the birth canal. His narrative is aimed at providing students with research material and probing questions to be asked of their lecturers to highlight the lack of discussion and silence with regard to many of these issues.

Mike

reply to post by mmiichael


I thought Neanderthal man and modern man could not reproduce together as they were far apart on the genetic scale. I will definitely get Stan Gooch's book on the subject. Thank you for the mention of the man and his book.

I think us modern humans like to put ourselves as the superior life form that ever lived on this planet.

reply to post by kidflash2008
AFAIK Homo Sapien and Homo Neanderthal didn't reproduce. The recent release of the Neanderthal genome didn't show any evidence of 'cave-love' between species. New evidence might have come to light in the past few months?

If the case remains, I'd be surprised if it was due to a lack of 'trying.' The (thankfully minority) male propensity to stick his tool in anything from chickens to horses and anything else, indicates an obstacle to inter-species reproduction. I've also read somewhere that a Neanderthal baby's head may well have been too large to survive birth and that female Sapiens' hips potentially made full-term pregnancy impossible.

huggs everyone,,,

ive seen articles on this,,,amazing!!

back in those times it was "dog eat dog",,,,,the worlds always been a frightfull place!!

the guys with the biggest guns are usually in charge....

huggs

Originally posted by kidflash2008
reply to post by mmiichael

 

I thought Neanderthal man and modern man could not reproduce together as they were far apart on the genetic scale. I will definitely get Stan Gooch's book on the subject. Thank you for the mention of the man and his book.

I think us modern humans like to put ourselves as the superior life form that ever lived on this planet.

I like your newer avatar. Was a fan of Wally West back when.

Really serious rethink of Neanderthals. A mistaken classification due to lack of skull and skeletal sampling. An older more primitive 'classic' precursor of half a million years ago, but the more modern Neanderthal, was closer to us than was thought. A handful of recent discoveries in Spain, Eastern Europe, show remains with features of both Cro-magnon and Neanderthal. Inescapable conclusion there was some intebreeding. Characterisitics still sen by populations in certain regions. Some claims to the contrary based on DNA evidence, but sampling may be for classic vs modern version. Also questions on interpretations of partial DNA.


Mike

I thought that Neanderthal and CroMagnon were not separate species, but one. Your reality was purposely fragmented to make it appear this way. The Neanderthal is the source of the Y-Chromosome while the CroMagnon is the X. Genetic studies usually focues on Mitochondrial DNA, thus focus upon the X chromosome. Meaning that no Neanderthal is shown in the record.

No offspring are found...because the Priests of the worlds Power depends on no offspring being known to exist, but they know that it exists and they spend much of their time searching out a certain Male who is in fact this Neanderthal.

The Neanderthal male exists within the human record as the Prime Male, known in Religious jargon as the Son of God. He is not the Son of the Earth.

Originally posted by Kandinsky
reply to post by kidflash2008

 

AFAIK Homo Sapien and Homo Neanderthal didn't reproduce. The recent release of the Neanderthal genome didn't show any evidence of 'cave-love' between species. New evidence might have come to light in the past few months?

If the case remains, I'd be surprised if it was due to a lack of 'trying.' The (thankfully minority) male propensity to stick his tool in anything from chickens to horses and anything else, indicates an obstacle to inter-species reproduction. I've also read somewhere that a Neanderthal baby's head may well have been too large to survive birth and that female Sapiens' hips potentially made full-term pregnancy impossible.

What has incorrectly been broadly classified as Neanderthal Man weaves in and out of human evolutionary history. Separated by geography for a few hundred thousand years then reintroduced into the gene mix.

As no one contests genome data it is accepted as fact. But with ancient genetic material many assumptions are made. So few remains of Neanderthals there has never been the broad sampling. But hybrids found with Neanderthal characteristics, and now others partial remains being re-examined.

There was interbreeding - more than realized till very recently.


M

www.gate2biotech.com...

Neanderthals may have given the modern humans who replaced them a priceless gift -- a gene that helped them develop superior brains, U.S. researchers reported on Tuesday.

And the only way they could have provided that gift would have been by interbreeding, the team at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Chicago said.

Their study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides indirect evidence that modern Homo sapiens and so-called Neanderthals interbred at some point when they lived side by side in Europe.

"Finding evidence of mixing is not all that surprising. But our study demonstrates the possibility that interbreeding contributed advantageous variants into the human gene pool that subsequently spread," said Bruce Lahn, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher at the University of Chicago who led the study.

Scientists have been debating whether Neanderthals, who died out about 35,000 years ago, ever bred with modern Homo sapiens. Neanderthals are considered more primitive, with robust bones but a smaller intellects than modern humans.

Lahn's team found a brain gene that appears to have entered the human lineage about 1.1 million years ago, and that has a modern form, or allele, that appeared about 37,000 years ago -- right before Neanderthals became extinct.

"The gene microcephalin (MCPH1) regulates brain size during development and has experienced positive selection in the lineage leading to Homo sapiens," the researchers wrote.

Positive selection means the gene conferred some sort of advantage, so that people who had it were more likely to have descendants than people who did not. Lahn's team estimated that 70 percent of all living humans have this type D variant of the gene.

"By no means do these findings constitute definitive proof that a Neanderthal was the source of the original copy of the D allele. However, our evidence shows that it is one of the best candidates," Lahn said.

The researchers reached their conclusions by doing a statistical analysis of the DNA sequence of microcephalin, which is known to play a role in regulating brain size in humans. Mutations in the human gene cause development of a much smaller brain, a condition called microcephaly.

By tracking smaller, more regular mutations, the researchers could look at DNA'S "genetic clock" and date the original genetic variant to 37,000 years ago.

They noted that this D allele is very common in Europe, where Neanderthals lived, and more rare in Africa, where they did not. Lahn said it is not yet clear what advantage the D allele gives the human brain.

"The D alleles may not even change brain size; they may only make the brain a bit more efficient if it indeed affects brain function," Lahn said.

Now his team is looking for evidence of Neanderthal origin for other human genes.

reply to post by mmiichael
Thanks for posting that...it's an area I'm very interested in. I'll have a good look at your links and post a reply later on. It conflicts what I thought I knew, so a bit of concentrated reading is required!

Humans also kill humans, as well as very nearly every other living species on the planet. This comes as no sort of shock to me.

There seems to be an effort to link humanity to the demise of the Neanderthal as a species, by way of some sort of paleolithic genocide. I don't think this is the case at all.

Humans go to war with one another, so it only makes sense that we also warred with other homo-species.

If I'm not horribly mistaken, there's some strong evidence of humans and Neanderthal coexisting to some extent - even trading among one another.

I don't think that humans could be held solely responsible for the Neanderthal's extinction. My guess is that their extinction was the result of a number of factors, one of which very likely was the human species expanding across the globe - the introduction of new diseases, as well as the inevitable wars.

reply to post by IDK88
Interesting. Is there a source you can link?