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Neandertals Had Symbols, But Did They Use Human Language?

Thursday, January 14, 2010

Neandertal Jewelry Shows Their Symbolic Smarts

Michael Balter

Science 15 January 2010:
Vol. 327. no. 5963, pp. 255 - 256
DOI: 10.1126/science.327.5963.255

A handful of marine mollusk shells, possibly used as necklaces and paint cups, shows that Neandertals expressed themselves symbolically, say the authors of a paper published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They argue that the findings suggest that social and demographic factors, rather than cognitive differences, best explain why so-called modern behavior was relatively rare among Neandertals.

Read abstract.

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Hunter Gatherer DNA from the Don

Saturday, January 09, 2010

The successful extraction of ancient DNA has been a rare accomplishment in genetic circles until recently. In the journal Current Biology, a German-Russian team details how it was possible to avoid the common pitfalls of contamination with modern human DNA in the instance of a 30,000 year-old hunter gatherer's grave in Russia. Svante Paabo, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and colleagues used the latest DNA sequencing techniques to study genetic information from human remains unearthed in 1954 at Kostenki, Russia. According to a report by the BBC, the hunter gatherer's mitochondrial DNA type was U2. Haplogroup U is seen as a predecessor dominant type among Europeans before the arrival of agriculture and Middle Eastern culture about five to seven thousand years ago. It is hoped the new expertise will help unlock the secrets of other examples of ancient DNA.

Title and authors of the article: A Complete mtDNA Genome of an Early Modern Human from Kostenki, Russia, by Johannes Krause, Adrian W. Briggs, Martin Kircher, Tomislav Maricic, Nicolas Zwyns, Anatoli Derevianko and Svante Pääbo

Summary The recovery of DNA sequences from early modern humans (EMHs) could shed light on their interactions with archaic groups such as Neandertals and their relationships to current human populations. However, such experiments are highly problematic because present-day human DNA frequently contaminates bones. For example, in a recent study of mitochondrial (mt) DNA from Neolithic European skeletons, sequence variants were only taken as authentic if they were absent or rare in the present population, whereas others had to be discounted as possible contamination. This limits analysis to EMH individuals carrying rare sequences and thus yields a biased view of the ancient gene pool. Other approaches of identifying contaminating DNA, such as genotyping all individuals who have come into contact with a sample, restrict analyses to specimens where this is possible and do not exclude all possible sources of contamination. By studying mtDNA in Neandertal remains, where contamination and endogenous DNA can be distinguished by sequence, we show that fragmentation patterns and nucleotide misincorporations can be used to gauge authenticity of ancient DNA sequences. We use these features to determine a complete mtDNA sequence from a ∼30,000-year-old EMH from the Kostenki 14 site

Reconstruction of the hunter gatherer. Courtesy BBC News.

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Neandertals Had Symbols, But Did They Use Human Language?

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Hunter Gatherer DNA from the Don

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