Neanderthal Man

The skull and almost complete skeleton of a Neanderthal man between 40,000 and 50,000 years old have been found in central Morocco near Fez, the Moroccan news agency MAP reported Tuesday. The skeleton was found lying on its back in a pit three yards below the surface by a team of geologists working for Fez College, the agency said Monday. It is the second discovery of its kind in Morocco since 1962, when two Neanderthal skulls were found in a mine near Safi, south of Casablanca.

Some Neanderthals may have had fair skin and red hair, giving them an appearance resembling modern Europeans, researchers reported Friday in the journal Science. The researchers found the MC1R gene and used DNA analysis to find a variation that produced the same pigmentation changes as in humans. It would have been an advantage for Neanderthals, allowing them to soak up more vitamin D from the sun in cloudy Europe.

Archeologists have discovered the bones of a Neanderthal woman and child in the German valley where the original Neanderthal Man was found about 150 years ago. Neanderthals died out about 30,000 years ago, and scientists say they are not direct ancestors of modern humans. The species is named after a village near Dusseldorf where the first Neanderthal remains were discovered in the summer of 1856.

Neanderthals probably had the gift of gab, according to a new study examining a key language gene in the extinct species. Until now, humans were thought to have a unique version of FOXP2, the only gene shown to play a role in language. People who are missing a copy have difficulty with speaking and language comprehension. The version of the gene in chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, is different from that of humans in two places.

Forget notions of Neanderthal man as a giant hairy brute who stumbled about, managing utterances no more sophisticated than an occasional "ugh" or "duh." Neanderthal man could talk, researchers say. He could not pronounce the letters "e" or "i," and he probably sounded a bit nasal and hard to understand, but he could communicate. Neanderthals even may have spun yarns, whispered gossip and told a few one-liners, says Terrence Deacon, assistant professor of anthropology at Harvard University.

There was a cartoon in an old issue of The New Yorker that showed a group of pugilistic types sitting around a table at a title fight, and one of the managers was leaning toward the promoter and saying: "My boy says he don't sign till he finds out precisely why they call him the Bushwick Assassin." If I were Iron Mike Tyson today, that vagrant thought might just cross my mind, too.

Some Neanderthals may have had fair skin and red hair, giving them an appearance resembling modern Europeans, researchers reported Friday in the journal Science. The researchers found the MC1R gene and used DNA analysis to find a variation that produced the same pigmentation changes as in humans. It would have been an advantage for Neanderthals, allowing them to soak up more vitamin D from the sun in cloudy Europe.

Researchers have sequenced the DNA of two extinct cave bears and say their method is accurate enough to try on extinct humans such as Neanderthals, according to a report published Thursday. The cave bears are the first extinct animals to have their genes sequenced, and the findings can be used to determine the precise relationship between the 40,000-year-old bears and living species.

Neanderthals may conjure up images of an uncivilized, brutish species, but they were surprisingly young developers, researchers said Wednesday. Although Neanderthals disappeared from Europe about 30,000 years ago, scientists at the French research institute CRNS in Paris have uncovered new details about them by studying fossils of teeth.

A two-year project has been launched to decipher the genetic code of the Neanderthal. Scientists from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and 454 Life Sciences Corp. of Branford, Conn., will reconstruct a draft of the 3 billion building blocks of the Neanderthal genome, working with fossil samples from several individuals. The Neanderthal species lived in Europe and western Asia from more than 200,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago.

British scientists have eliminated one potential explanation for the Neanderthals' extinction 26,000 to 32,000 years ago. Using a core sample of ocean sediment drilled from Venezuela's Cariaco Basin, researchers from the University of Leeds concluded that there were no significant changes in climate during the period. That leaves elimination of the Neanderthals by modern humans as the most likely explanation, they reported Thursday in the journal Nature.

Using a 38,000-year-old bone fragment found in a Croatian cave, scientists have decoded a section of DNA from humanity's closest related species -- the long-extinct and enigmatic Neanderthal. The reports, published concurrently today in the journals Nature and Science, demonstrate the feasibility of squeezing genetic information out of fossils -- a new way of probing the ancient past that until now has been glimpsed primarily through scattered bones and artifacts.

Neanderthals survived for thousands of years longer than scientists thought, with small bands finding refuge in a massive cave near the southern tip of Spain, new research suggests. The work contends that Neanderthals were using a cave in Gibraltar at least 2,000 years later than their presence had been firmly documented anywhere before, researchers said.

A two-year project has been launched to decipher the genetic code of the Neanderthal. Scientists from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and 454 Life Sciences Corp. of Branford, Conn., will reconstruct a draft of the 3 billion building blocks of the Neanderthal genome, working with fossil samples from several individuals. The Neanderthal species lived in Europe and western Asia from more than 200,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago.

The ancestors of modern humans moved into and across Europe, ousting the Neanderthals faster than previously thought, a new analysis of radiocarbon data shows. Rather than taking 7,000 years to colonize Europe from Africa, the reinterpreted data indicated the process might have taken 5,000 years, Paul Mellars, a professor of prehistory at Cambridge University, said in the current issue of the journal Nature.

Researchers have sequenced the DNA of two extinct cave bears and say their method is accurate enough to try on extinct humans such as Neanderthals, according to a report published Thursday. The cave bears are the first extinct animals to have their genes sequenced, and the findings can be used to determine the precise relationship between the 40,000-year-old bears and living species.

You may think your grandparents act like Neanderthals, but U.S. researchers said they had strong evidence that modern humans are not descended from them. A computer analysis of the skulls of modern humans, Neanderthals, monkeys and apes showed that modern humans are substantially different, physically, from those early humans.

Using a 38,000-year-old bone fragment found in a Croatian cave, scientists have decoded a section of DNA from humanity's closest related species -- the long-extinct and enigmatic Neanderthal. The reports, published concurrently today in the journals Nature and Science, demonstrate the feasibility of squeezing genetic information out of fossils -- a new way of probing the ancient past that until now has been glimpsed primarily through scattered bones and artifacts.

Neanderthals may conjure up images of an uncivilized, brutish species, but they were surprisingly young developers, researchers said Wednesday. Although Neanderthals disappeared from Europe about 30,000 years ago, scientists at the French research institute CRNS in Paris have uncovered new details about them by studying fossils of teeth.

You may think your grandparents act like Neanderthals, but U.S. researchers said they had strong evidence that modern humans are not descended from them. A computer analysis of the skulls of modern humans, Neanderthals, monkeys and apes showed that modern humans are substantially different, physically, from those early humans.