Kristina Killgrove is a staff writer at Live Science with a focus on archaeology and paleoanthropology news. Her articles have also appeared in venues such as Forbes, Smithsonian, and Mental Floss. Killgrove holds postgraduate degrees in anthropology and classical archaeology and was formerly a university professor and researcher.
People have been fascinated by Neanderthals ever since we discovered their bones in a German cave in the mid-19th century. Their stocky bodies and huge heads give us a fun-house-mirror glimpse into the evolutionary road we might have traveled. Even though DNA research has shown that all modern-day human populations have a little Neanderthal in them, we still view our Neanderthal cousins as the black sheep lineage of the Homo genus.
2. Neanderthals cared for their comrades with disabilities.A fragment of a Neanderthal child's ear bone suggests she had Down syndrome and that she was cared for by her community. In a study published in June in the journal Science Advances, researchers identified a 6-year-old Neanderthal child nicknamed"Tina" in a cave in Spain. Tina's ear bone, which dated to between 273,000 and 146,000 years ago, has a shape associated with Down syndrome, as well as other abnormalities.
4. Modern humans and Neanderthals buried their dead differently.Putting a dead body in a hole and covering it up is a burial practice exclusive to humans and Neanderthals. But Neanderthals buried their dead differently than Homo sapiens, according to research published this summer in the journal L'Anthropologie.
6. The last Neanderthals were isolated.DNA sequencing of a Neanderthal nicknamed"Thorin" revealed that some groups may have been isolated for thousands of years before going extinct. Discovered in France's Rhône Valley, Thorin was dated to between 52,000 and 42,000 years ago. His DNA suggested that his lineage was quite inbred, even though other Neanderthal groups lived nearby.
But it is not yet certain why the Neanderthal Y chromosome is no longer in our evolutionary gene pool. Because it is passed down only from father to son, it may have simply been lost over the generations.
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