A Shocking Find In a Neanderthal Cave In France

The Atlantic

A rock structure, built deep underground, is one of the earliest hominin constructions ever found.

In February 1990, thanks to a 15-year-old boy named Bruno Kowalsczewski, footsteps echoed through the chambers of Bruniquel Cave for the first time in tens of thousands of years.

The cave sits in France’s scenic Aveyron Valley, but its entrance had long been sealed by an ancient rockslide. Kowalsczewski’s father had detected faint wisps of air emerging from the scree, and the boy spent three years clearing away the rubble. He eventually dug out a tight, thirty-meter-long passage that the thinnest members of the local caving club could squeeze through. They found themselves in a large, roomy corridor. There were animal bones and signs of bear activity, but nothing recent. The floor was pockmarked with pools of water. The walls were punctuated by stalactites (the ones that hang down) and stalagmites (the ones that stick up).

Some 336 meters into the cave, the caver stumbled across something extraordinary—a vast chamber where several stalagmites had been deliberately broken. Most of the 400 pieces had been arranged into two rings—a large one between 4 and 7 metres across, and a smaller one just 2 metres wide. Others had been propped up against these donuts. Yet others had been stacked into four piles. Traces of fire were everywhere, and there was a mass of burnt bones.  

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Fifth of Neanderthals' genetic code lives on in modern humans

Comment: Does make you wonder if this is where certain genetic predispositions to psychopathy made an entry?  Cro-Magnon man became infected for evermore. For more on this you might want to read this astounding article. But prepare to have your beliefs challenged.

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Many of the Neanderthal genes that live on in people today are involved in making keratin,

a protein used in skin, hair and nails. Photograph: Jose A Astor/Alamy

The Guardian

The last of the Neanderthals may have died out tens of thousands of years ago, but large stretches of their genetic code live on in people today.

Though many of us can claim only a handful of Neanderthal genes, when added together, the human population carries more than a fifth of the archaic human's DNA, researchers found.

The finding means that scientists can study about 20% of the Neanderthal genome without having to prise the genetic material from fragile and ancient fossils.

The Neanderthal traces in our genetic makeup are the lasting legacy of sexual encounters between our direct ancestors and the Neanderthals they met when they walked out of Africa and into Eurasia about 65,000 years ago.

The populations of both groups were likely so small that interbreeding was a rare event, but the benefits of some Neanderthal genes were so great that they spread through the population and linger on in modern non-Africans today.

Benjamin Vernot and Joshua Akey at the University of Washington in Seattle sequenced the genomes of more than 600 people from Europe and eastern Asia. They then used a computer analysis to find gene variants that bore all the hallmarks of having come from Neanderthals.

To see whether the technique worked, they checked the genes against the official Neanderthal genome, which was sequenced from fossil remnants in 2010 by researchers in Germany.

The researchers found that while most non-Africans carried 1 to 3% Neanderthal DNA, the total amount in modern humans reached about 20%. "Although Neanderthals are extinct, there's still a lot of genetic information about them floating around, in our own genomes. It's not necessarily useful in that it will cure cancer, but it helps us to learn about our history," Vernot told the Guardian. Details of the study are reported in Science.

The researchers now believe that even deeper mining of modern genomes could help to find genetic traces of other archaic humans.

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There's no resting place for the human race

New Scientist
19 December 2013

This year, many fixed points in the human condition have begun to look distinctly movable
 

THE Chinese robot now roving the moon's surface – Yutu, the Jade Rabbit – is humanity's first emissary there for nearly 40 years. It is named after the companion of the moon goddess Chang'e. More such explorers will follow over the next decade, but few, if any, will bear names from the Greek and Russian traditions associated with the first space race.

Rather, they are beginning a new tradition. As one scientist puts it, the moon is "the eighth continent", a chunk torn off Earth aeons ago. That's not just a hypothesis for our satellite's origins: the latest space racers want to build a lunar staging post for exploration, and settlement, of the solar system (see "China lands on moon, kicks off next lunar space race").

This is not a new dream, but the urge to leave Earth is getting easier to envisage in a world of limited resources and ambitious billionaires. But do we have the right to spread to other worlds before putting our own in order? How will humanity define and locate itself when it lives on more than one planet?

This is just one of many developments challenging how we see our place in the universe. It is customary at this time of year to reflect on the past 12 months. In that spirit, let's consider a couple more advances and see if we can get a sense of where we might soon find ourselves.

Consider humanity itself. Sequencing the genome of the Denisovans, a mysterious group of prehistoric hominins, suggests that interbreeding between Neanderthals, Denisovans and humans seems to have been common, rather than the rarity previously assumed – which further drives home the idea that we are the sole survivors of a precarious evolutionary process, rather than the end of a neat line of descent. That deals yet another blow to the hubristic assumption that humanity's place is at the apex of the natural world.

Intriguingly, here at our end of the human timeline, we are beginning to engineer our own genome. Next year is likely to see the conception of a child with DNA from three parents (see "2014 Preview: Three-parent babies close to conception"). The modification is life-changing – it will prevent certain inherited diseases – but minor. Nonetheless, the introduction of genetic material that could be passed down the generations represents a watershed. How far should we go in compensating for shortcomings in our genetic inheritance? What conditions would merit such tinkering?

We need not journey into space, or history, to find ourselves rethinking our place in the world. 

Smartphones provide us with unprecedented context about our surroundings, allowing us to seek out everything from a cold drink to a hot date. They also let us detach ourselves from those around us, as we look at screens rather than our neighbours' faces.

So the line between physical here and online there is becoming increasingly blurred. Devices such as Glass, Google's augmented reality spectacles, and advances in robotics and remote control will only accelerate that trend (see "Mind-reading light helps you stay in the zone" and "The mystery behind Google's sudden robotics splurge"). Our experiences of the world, and our sense of our place in it, may soon be very different – not just from how we perceive it now, but also from how our neighbours do. Will sharing our thoughts and experiences bring us together? Or will we end up living in worlds of our own?

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg. Many fields, from climatology to neuroscience, raise questions about who we are and where we fit in. But that's nothing new.

Science and technology have always posed challenges, and we have always assimilated them – eventually. That drive has got us where we are today. Perhaps that's the only real constant here: to be human is to continually seek out a new place in the world.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Perpetual motion"

 Read more: "2014 preview: 10 ideas that will matter next year"