Neanderthals and modern humans may have coexisted

Neanderthals and modern humans may have coexisted

By PAUL RECER

WASHINGTON (October 25, 1999 5:00 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - According to new radiocarbon dating of bones from a cave in Croatia, Neanderthals and modern humans may have coexisted in central Europe for thousands of years, possibly even mating.

Bones found in the Vindija cave site in Croatia have yielded the youngest dates ever, 28,000 to 29,000 years, for Neanderthal remains, said Fred H. Smith, an anthropologist at Northern Illinois University.

Smith said it was the strongest evidence yet that the primitive Neanderthal lived at the same time and at the same place as did modern human beings.

A report on the Neanderthal specimens will be published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Neanderthals, a primitive hominid with prominent brow, coarse jaw, short lower limbs and a prominence at the back of the skull, are thought to have arisen in Africa more than 250,000 years ago. They are thought to have appeared in Europe about 100,000 years ago and were eventually replaced by modern humans.

Specimens for modern humans dated at 90,000 to 100,000 years have been found in Africa and in the Middle East. Modern human bones found in central Europe have been dated at about 32,000 years.

The new Neanderthal age dates are based on material removed from a jawbone and a skull bone found in the Croatian cave. The specimens had earlier been dated at 45,000 years using a gamma ray counter. The new dates of 28,000 to 29,000 were determined using a more accurate method called accelerator radiocarbon dating, which measures the level in the specimen of a carbon isotope.

The new dates for the Neanderthal, said Smith, mean "there was an overlap of 3,000 to 4,000 years" with modern humans in central Europe.

Smith said the find strengthens the theory that Neanderthals and modern humans did mate and produce hybrid children that had genes from both species.

He said he and others believe that there are body features in bones from 30,000-year-old human specimens that suggest a Neanderthal contribution to the European gene pool.

Erik Trinkaus of Washington University at St. Louis, a co-author of the study, said that the remains of a human child found in Portugal included features in the legs, arms, teeth and skull that resemble those of the Neanderthal.

"The Portuguese specimen shows that an admixture did occur in Portugal and could very well have occurred elsewhere," said Trinkaus.

The mixing of modern humans and Neanderthals is a controversial issue among anthropologists, and Clark Howell of the University of California, Berkeley, said not many agree with Smith and Trinkaus.

Howell said the new dates found by Smith and Trinkaus "are not surprising" and do prove that Neanderthals and modern humans may have lived in Central Europe at about the same time.

But he said there is no widely accepted evidence that the primitive hominids and modern humans actually mated and produced children.

"You could argue that they lived apart in the same area and threw rocks at each other instead of genes," said Howell.

He said he believes the characteristics in the modern human skeletons that Trinkaus and Smith attribute to Neanderthal are actually within the range of normal variations for humans.

Smith said the issue may eventually be settled by genetic testing. Some DNA has been recovered from ancient bones, he said, and researchers in Sweden are attempting to compare gene fragments from Neanderthals to that of modern humans.