Humans, Neanderthal | featured news

Neanderthals were big game hunters who feasted on mammoth and rhino but didn’t or couldn’t eat smaller, leaner meat.

In an interview with Der Spiegel, geneticist George Church made some headlines by claiming that it will be possible to clone a Neanderthal in the near future.

Our ancestors didn't walk alone: Neanderthals and other ancient peoples shared Earth with them tens of thousands of years ago. Now, using new technology, scientists have sequenced with high precision the genome of one of those close but little-known relatives: an extinct people known as the Denisovans, who lived in and around modern-day Siberia.

Humanity's right-hand dominance might be more than 500,000 years old, new research indicates. The trait of right-handedness is commonly believed to be a sign of the development of another uniquely human trait — language.

Siberia's Denisova cave held the pinky bone of an unknown early human species, a genetics team reported in March. The Naturejournal study, led by Johannes Krause of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, offered no answer for what happened to this "archaic" human species, more than one million years old and living near their human and Neanderthal cousins as recently as 30,000 years ago.

Neanderthals, a long-extinct species, survive today in the genes of almost everyone outside Africa, according to an international research team who offer the first molecular evidence that early humans mated and produced children in liaisons with Neanderthals.

Newly analyzed remains suggest that a modern human killed a Neanderthal man in what is now Iraq between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago.