john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

Neandertal CSI revisited

Thu, 2010-01-07 07:30 -- John Hawks

Discover has put an article online that they ran in the November issue, which features Steven Churchill's research ("Did we mate with Neanderthals, or did we murder them"). It's a good "present status" article about possible human-Neandertal interactions, pretty much as summarized in the headline. It would be a good link for intro classes.

For more information about almost every one of the topics in the article, you could do worse than searching my archives:

The Shanidar impact wounds: "Real stories of the Neandertal CSI"

Les Rois: "Another Aurignacian Neandertal, or just dinner?", and "Les Rois revisited, and dental classification of other Aurignacian individuals"

Mary Stiner and Steven Kuhn's social structure hypothesis: "Barbaric yawping about Neandertal women"

Tags: 
aggression
Shanidar
Neandertals

Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.