a Denisovan skull

I completely missed the memo when this happened but two separate molecular studies published earlier this year convincingly show that a known hominin skull unearthed in the 1930s at Harbin, China, actually represents a Denisovan. After more than a decade of knowing this hominin species (as closely related to us as Neanderthals) only by the genome, some small fossil bones, and traces of DNA left in modern humans, Denisovans finally have a face. I only became aware of this when I looked at a paper using predicted phenotype trends to try and identify Denisovans among the known fossils, and the Harbin skull, whose identification as Denisovan was published while that paper was under review, came out as the one most likely to be a Denisovan, so that's a third line of independent evidence.

As I have covered the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes for 20 years now (see the Neanderthal tag), I found this extremely exciting and was a bit shocked that it didn't make a bigger splash in the general media. After all, this is a discovery on equal terms with the first Neanderthal skeleton. So obviously I had to do another Denisovan feature, which is out now:

Finding Denisovans

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 19, 6 October 2025, Pages R897-R899

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(contact me if you would like a PDF)

See also my Mastodon thread where I highlighted all CB features of 2025.

The thread for 2024 is here .

The Harbin cranium, which has now been identified as Denisovan by several independent measures, has a size within the range of modern humans but some distinct archaic features. (Photo: Reprinted from Ni et al. (2021) Innovation 2, 100130, with permission.)

neanderthals alive and well

Reflecting on the Nobel prize for Svante Pääbo for his revolutionary work on Neanderthal genomics (which I've been covering for nearly 20 years), it struck me that there is now a lot more Neanderthal DNA walking around than there ever was when being a Neanderthal was still a thing. Back of the envelope calculation: if we have 2% Neanderthal genes on average in 5 billion non-African people, that gets you easily to the equivalent of 100 million Neanderthals alive today. Before they became extinct, there never were as many as 100,000 of them alive at the same time, so we're talking a 1,000-fold rise. If you have to become extinct, that's not the worst way to go.

Those Neanderthal genes are still around for reasons, as they were beneficial to our sapiens ancestors, and science is now beginning to understand in which ways our Neanderthal heritage shapes our physiology, which of course has implications for medicine. Which explains why Pääbo got the prize for physiology or medicine even though his patients have been dead for 30k years.

Moreover, Neanderthals are also coming back to life in the sense that paleogenomic studies are now revealing details of family relations, diet etc.

All of which was a welcome excuse to write another feature on Neanderthals (I even have a tag for them), which is out now:

Neanderthals come to life

Current Biology Volume 32, Issue 22, 21. November 2022, Pages R1245-R1247

FREE access to full text and PDF download

NB: as the 2022 features move into the open archives, I will add them to this thread on Mastodon.

Around 100 non-African humans: that's two Neanderthals right there. (Photo: Ryoji Iwata/Unsplash.)

palaeo beyond genomics

I've been covering the very exciting progress in ancient DNA studies for nearly 20 years now, and I'm not complaining, but, in order to persuade editors that they should publish even more of my ravings, I need to introduce new elements every once in a while. So it was rather handy that recent developments in palaeoanthropology have featured a few things that were molecular but not based on the genomes retrieved from ancient people's bones, including proteomes read from tooth proteins (which may allow us to travel a lot further back in time), microbiomes, and DNA from dirt with absolutely no trace of fossil remains.

And the Neanderthal teeth used in the dental microbiome study come from the cave of Sima de las palomas (near Murcia), where I've also been scraping around in the dirt for a while, a few years before the site started coughing up some very impressive Neanderthal skeletons.

Looking at it from an analytics perspective for a chemically minded audience, I've discussed these developments in my latest feature for Chemistry & Industry, which is out now:

Chemistry & Industry Volume 85, Issue 7/8, July-August 2021 Pages 23-26

access via:

Wiley Online Library (paywalled)

SCI - appears to be on open access right now

Lateral view of the mostly-complete skull of Zlatý kůň, which cannot be carbon-dated but has now been identified as the earliest modern human from Europe, based on recent admixture of Neanderthal ancestry.
Credit: Martin Frouz
Source

Oh, and Blogspot tells me that this is my 1999th published post. So let's party like it's 1999, and watch out for the millennium bug!

before Neanderthals and Denisovans

I have written quite a few pieces about Neanderthals and Denisovans in recent years, but not all that much about the earlier stages of human evolution. This was mainly because I usually covered molecular / genetic studies into prehistoric populations, beginning with the first attempts at the Neanderthal genome and leading up to today's remarkably rich, genetically based accounts of our prehistory.

The limited shelf life of DNA means that we aren't likely to see any comparable details regarding the populations and species that came before Neanderthals and Denisovans, the likes of Homo erectus and Australopithecus afarensis. However, researchers have now succeeded in getting protein sequences from teeth of human relatives up to 800,000 years old, which drives the molecular investigation of human evolution much deeper into the past than has been possible before. Which was a good excuse to expand the range of my coverage as well and look into the deeper layers of our evolution in my feature which is out now:

Digging deeper into human evolution

Current Biology Volume 30, Issue 9, 04 May 2020, Pages R371-R374

FREE access to full text and PDF download




Homo erectus remains have been found in Africa, Europe and Asia. This skull is from the Dmanisi cave in Georgia, where samples for successful proteomic analyses were also obtained. (Photo: Rama/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 FR).)

ancient art

Prehistoric cave art has been found on all continents inhabited by humans, and it tells us not only about the early forms of artistic expression and the thinking of our distant ancestors, but also about their place in nature. I wrote a feature focusing on the biological and psychological aspects of this art, of which new and spectacular examples are still being discovered, described and dated to this day.

My feature is out now:


Cave art reveals human nature

Current Biology Volume 30, Issue 3, 03 February 2020, Pages R95-R98

FREE access to full text and PDF download




In a recently investigated cave painting from Sulawesi Island, Indonesia, minuscule stick figures armed with spears and ropes appear to be hunting anoas (Bubalus sp.). (Photo: Ratno Sardi, from Nature (2019) 576, 442–445.)

our Neanderthal heritage

I have a soft spot for Neanderthals, so it's always nice to see new insight coming out into what they left us, not just in terms of bones and artifacts, but also in our genomes. With genetic discoveries in the UK Biobank and the recent discovery of the genome of Denny, the child of a Neanderthal and a Denisovan, there was now enough material for a feature on the encounters and minglings between the three groups of ancient humans that were out and about in Palaeolithic Eurasia. Still no news on why two of them became extinct. Maybe they were just climate change deniers ...

My feature is out now:


Mingling with Neanderthals

Current Biology Volume 29, issue 4, pages R105-R107, February 18, 2019

FREE access to full text and PDF download


Oh, and in the process I also learned that there is now an entire book about the Neanderthal residents of the Sima de las Palomas cave, where firstborn and I spent a week helping Michael Walker's team with the excavations, many years ago:

The people of Palomas : Neandertals from the Sima de las Palomas del Cabezo Gordo, southeastern Spain
Erik Trinkaus; Michael J Walker
College Station, Texas : Texas A&M University Press, [2017]

a very lucky find

Open Archive Day

Last week brought a report of an extremely mindboggling discovery that perhaps got less coverage than it deserved (in the Guardian at least it was a very small story well hidden), namely the genome of an ancient human whose mother was a Neanderthal while her father was a Denisovan. (Update 24.11.2018: here is a feature in the Observer on "Denny".)

Just to briefly summarise the possibilities:

* If interbreeding between these two groups was common and successful in terms of viable and fertile offspring, this wouldn't be surprising, but in this case we should have come across other intermediate forms earlier, so not very likely.

* If interbreeding was common and successful in the first generation (but left the offspring infertile or perhaps with some other kind of fitness limitation) there might have been a few of those, but researchers would be very lucky to hit on one of them.

* If interbreeding was rarely successful, this would have to count as an extremely lucky find.

So in any case it is pretty mindboggling, and I trust that Svante Pääbo, who is a joint senior author on the paper, will have triple-checked everything before letting this out.

All of which is just an excuse for plugging my feature on human evolution which I wrote four years ago after attending a meeting with Svante Pääbo and everybody else who is anybody in human evolution:


The complicated origins of our species


Apart from last year's effort specifically on palaeoanthropology in China, this appears to be my most recent one with actual Neanderthals in it. Given how fast the field is moving, I should revisit it soon.

Oh, and what I did visit recently is the Neanderthal museum in the eponymous valley, which hasn't quite caught up with the Neanderthal genome revolution yet, but has this amusing scene of life in the stone age to offer:



(own photo)

it's complicated

Open Archive Day

The evolutionary history of our species used to be simple due to the scarcity of data. We had about seven data points and drew a squiggly line to connect them and that was that (maybe I'm simplifying this slightly). Now we have genomes of modern and archaic humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans, increasingly documenting migrations and admixture, so it's getting more complicated as there are so many dots to connect. Plus, finds in Asia could still undermine the whole out of Africa thing.

A year ago, I had a closer look at fresh palaeoanthropology from China, but I suspect things are changing so fast I may have to rewrite this account pretty soon. Anyhow, here it is again, on open access, enjoy it while it is still more or less true:

A new continent for human evolution



A collection of 47 human teeth discovered at Daoxian is anatomically modern yet surprisingly old. (Photo: S. Xing and X-J. Wu.)

eastern evolution

Homo sapiens came out of Africa and conquered the world, more or less in one sweep, or so we used to think. Exciting new finds from China, however, suggest that a significant movement to the East - convenient inasmuch as it allowed people to stay broadly in the same climate and vegetation zone - happened much earlier than previously thought, and much earlier than the expansion into Europe.

I've discussed the latest discoveries from China, also including two archaic human skulls that have been speculatively linked to the Denisovans so far only known by their DNA, in my feature which is out now:

A new continent for human evolution
Current Biology Volume 27, Issue 7, pR243–R245, 3 April 2017

FREE access to full text and PDF download







The Xuchang 1 (A, superior view) and 2 (B, posterior view) crania discovered at the Lingjing site. (Photo: Xiu-jie Wu.)

origins of our species

Last month I attended a fascinating symposium on human evolution at Sitges, near Barcelona. I got the impression that the origins of our species are getting more complicated with all the new information coming in from genetic and archaeological finds. So my latest feature is called:

The complicated origins of our species

Current Biology Volume 24, Issue 8, pR295–R298, 14 April 2014

and it's on free access now until the next issue appears:

HTML text (with sharing buttons, hint, hint)

PDF download

Full moon rising over Sitges beaches and harbour (own photo).

Neanderthals old and new

Way back in the summer of 2003, Firstborn and I did some volunteer work helping to dig for Neanderthal remains in a cave in the Murcia district, Southern Spain. A single Neanderthal tooth that my daughter spotted was the most exciting thing that the hard work of 15 or so people produced during an entire week. There was also a femur head (the “ball” of the hip joint), but it was impossible to tell whether it was hominid or perhaps from a large mammal such as a deer. See my book The birds, the bees and the platypuses (pp77-80) for a more detailed account of our Neanderthal adventures.

I never went back to the cave and lost contact with the research team in the following years. Imagine my surprise then, as I researched an article on modern (genomic, imaging, etc.) methods of research into Neanderthals and found out that in the years 2005-2008, the very cutting where we had scraped around for a week had yielded skeletons with articulated parts of three Neanderthal individuals, found in an arrangement that suggests they may have been buried ritually (with their hands close to their heads, as has also been observed in other Neanderthal graves).

Given the slow progress of the excavation, which is carried out only during the summer months, we must have been less than a metre away from those skeletons. While there have been similar finds further north in Europe, this burial site is a first for the Mediterranean coast, and it may allow comparative studies re. how Neanderthals lived under different climate conditions. Sadly, however, attempts to retrieve DNA from the Spanish Neanderthals have remained fruitless. It appears that the genetic material doesn’t survive very well in the hot climate of southern Spain.

The discovery and excavation of the three skeletons is described in great detail in

M. J. Walker et al., Quaternary International 2011 (in press), doi:10.1016/j.quaint.2011.03.034

As the cleaning and detailed characterisation of each skeleton proceeds, individual studies will also become available. The first one appeared in September in PNAS:

M. J. Walker et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 2011, 108, 10087

Oh, and my news feature on how genomics, imaging etc. is revolutionising palaeoanthropology is out in Current Biology today:

Virtual Neanderthals
Current Biology, Volume 21, Issue 21, R871-R873, 8 November 2011
doi:10.1016/j.cub.2011.10.031

Abstract and FREE access to PDF file

neanderthals and twins

the usual round-up of German pieces published this month includes a detailed look at the scientific challenge behind the Neanderthal genome, and an appreciation of twins research in the times of epigenetics, plus some fun with chemical fingerprints:


Spektrum der Wissenschaft No. 7, pp 12-14
Neandertaler-Erbgut entschlüsselt

Nachrichten aus der Chemie No 7/8, pp769-771
Identische Gene, verschiedene Schicksale
(plus a box with a brief Neanderthal update - have covered the N. genome project in this magazine before)

Nachrichten aus der Chemie No 7/8, p 733
Chemischer Fingerabdruck

neanderthal debate

Also in this week's issue of Current Biology (apart from those 3 pieces by me) is an interesting dispatch on the Neanderthal genome, raising the issue that our insufficient understanding of genetic diversity within sub-Saharan Africa may mean there are other explanations for the genome results than those favoured by Pääbo et al.

Essentially, if African diversity was already geographically segregated at the time the Neanderthals migrated towards Europe, their similarity could simply mean that they derived from the same sub-group of Africans as the later Homo sapiens migrants that settled the rest of the world. If I understand it correctly, this would mean however, that the genetic differences within Africa should be as large as those between modern humans and Neanderthals, which is not what has been observed.

The authors also offer a more complicated model, involving human emigration from Africa, mixing with Neanderthals, return to Africa, and then emigrating again, which in my eyes falls victim to Ockham's razor, as it is needlessly complicated.

But anyhow, I agree that one should sequence a lot more African genomes, seeing that most of human diversity is between Africans, not between the groups wrongly labelled as "races".

Reference:

Neandertal Genome: The Ins and Outs of African Genetic Diversity
Jason A. Hodgson, Christina M. Bergey and Todd R. Disotell

Current Biology, Volume 20, Issue 12, R517-R519, 22 June 2010

summary and link to pdf file

why the Neanderthal genome matters

Amidst all the ado about the UK general election, few people around here will have noticed that a draft genome of our Neanderthal (or Neandertal, as they spell it in the US and in Germany) relatives was published in Science magazine on Friday, 7.5. What press coverage there was focussed on the finding that all modern non-Africans analysed in comparison have a very small number of “typical Neanderthal” genetic traits, suggesting that the small group of early humans that emigrated from Africa and then went on to populate the rest of the world must have interbred with an even smaller number of Neanderthals.

Personally, I find that specific result neither surprising nor terribly important. What I find much more exciting about this project is, firstly, the phenomenal difficulty that had to be overcome (which is why the project is discussed in the “crazy” section of my recent book, The birds, the bees, and the platypuses), and secondly, the usefulness of Neanderthals as an external reference point for genetic and biomedical studies of our own species.

To the first point, as I have both worked with DNA and dug for Neanderthal remains, I was awestruck a few years ago, when Svante Pääbo and colleagues set out to sequence a complete genome, based on a 50-microgram DNA sample from a single rotten bone (if memory serves, 50 micrograms of DNA may well be invisible to the naked eye). Apparently, they have a little more material now (seeing they report a composite genome derived from three individuals), but still. If you consider that only 10 years ago the draft sequence of Homo sapiens, a species of which we have more than 6 billion specimens walking around, required a monumental effort and astronomical cost to sequence even in a crude draft version, the success of the Neanderthal sequencing project just a decade later is just mindboggling. Especially because the risk of contamination with modern human DNA must be severely limiting the sequencing effort. Every bone fragment that any Homo sapiens has touched with their bare hands is probably a lost cause already.

Regarding the second point, we are only beginning to get an impression of the diversity of individual human genomes, but as we are accumulating more and more personal genomes and begin to draw medical conclusions from them, it is important to have an “ancient” reference for comparison, to be able to deduce which of the genetic variants is the original one and which is the mutation. To some extent, the chimpanzee genome can serve as a stop-gap in this role, but Neanderthal being so much closer to us, it is a much more useful reference point. The new research puts the parting of ways at 270,000 to 440,000 years, while chimps and humans parted company some five million years ago.

Finally, in the analysis of the few genetic variants that we non-Africans seem to have inherited from Neanderthals, there are already some interesting clues for medical research. Most intriguingly, one of the genes has been linked to autism. A few years ago, there was a short story published in Nature, exploring the possibility that we have our “nerdy” genes (an overdose of which may cause autism) from Neanderthals, which implies that Neanderthal society failed because of a lack of social instincts. This story could now turn out to be amazingly prescient.


References:

R. E. Green et al., Science 2010, 328, 710.
H.A.Burbano et al., Science 2010, 328, 723.

a very old hand-axe

[ -- > deutsche Version ]

Back in 2003, my daughter and I took part in a palaeo-anthropological dig at Sima de las Palomas, in Southern Spain (as described in Birds/Bees/Platypuses, page 77), as volunteers to support the research efforts of Michael Walker, who runs excavations at two sites in the area. Just ahead of our arrival, a team at the other site, Cueva Negra de Estrecho del Rio Quipar (which we also visited on our day off), had discovered an ancient stone tool, a hand-axe, which we duly admired. I think it was the first stone tool from that site, and there was a great deal of excitement about it.

Imagine my surprise now to read in last week’s issue of Nature that researchers using magnetic field measurements have re-assessed the dating of the geological layers in Cueva Negra, and come to the conclusion that this hand-axe we admired 6 years ago, together with another tool found at the same site, must be by far the oldest bi-facial stone tools discovered in Europe so far. (I think “bi-facial” implies that bits were chipped off from both sides of a flat natural stone to produce a relatively sharp edge.)

Cueva Negra was previously estimated to be 200,000 years old. The new date is 900,000 years, moving these two tools into the Early Pleistocene. (Technically, the magnetic measurements would also fit an even older date, but that appears unlikely considering the finds at the site.) Bi-facial stone tools from that era had so far only been known from Africa. The only European stone tools that are even older are uni-facial Oldowan tools from around 1.2 million years ago. Not sure what the precise scientific classification of the original owners of those tools is. While at Sima de las Palomas we were digging for Neanderthal remains, the Cueva Negra inhabitants must have been Homo heidelbergensis or something like that.

Will have to check up the literature about our site, maybe there have been exciting developments there as well and I missed them.

References:

G. R. Scott, L. Gibert, Nature 2009, 461, 82.
M. J. Walker et al. Eurasian Prehistory 2006, 4, 3.

PS Bi-facial hand-axes look like this example from the excellent article in the Spanish version of Wikipedia:

early music

I have now read the paper on the 40,000 year old flute from the Hohle Fels cave in Southwest Germany, which came out in print in today's issue of Nature (online in June). Really exciting stuff. Just imagine you're going through a layer of sediment which you know with absolute certainty to be > 35 k years old and you find bits of a musical instrument. The first author says in the front section of the magazine that it was a shock, which is probably an understatement. I would probably have died from a heart attack on the spot.

Looking at the photos, the instrument looks really sophisticated as well. For instance, the surroundings of the holes are flattened to make it easier to find the hole and to close it precisely with the finger. The mouthpiece looks intriguing as well. In the interview at the front of the magazine the first author says that a replica of the flute is now available (finding a matching vulture bone seems to have been the rate-limiting step!), so I am looking forward to finding out more about the musical properties of the instrument.

Also, still intrigued about a possible link with the vaguely simultaneous disappearance of the Neanderthals (about which there is a nice feature by Kate Wong in the August issue of Scientific American). The image of a pied piper comes to mind ...

early music and art

I managed to miss the story of the world's oldest flute when I was travelling in June, but found it in the August issue of Spektrum der Wissenschaft. I'm intrigued to learn that the earliest instrument was found just a few feet away from the world's oldest sculpture, in the Hohle Fels cave in south west Germany. Both date from around 35,000 years ago, i.e. around the time when Neanderthals disappeared from Europe.

So it all fits together, our ancestors had visual arts and music and all that, while Neanderthals got bored to death ...

PS original paper on the earliest flute is in Nature AOP

what I found out this week

a few intriguing things I found out in the last few days:

* thanks to the new "algorithmic" search engine Wolfram alpha I can now check up where the space probe pioneer 10 is at the moment.

* also intrigued to find that Wolfram alpha gives the result in miles by default, although it generously offers metric conversion as an option.

* the oldest sculptures of human figures, such as the "Hohle Fels Venus" reported in the current issue of Nature, date from about the same time as the extinction of the Neanderthals. Now I wonder whether there is a causal connection, and if so, in which direction. Did Neanderthals die out because they weren't imaginative enough to compete in the arts scene? Or did Cro-Magnon relax from the stress of wiping out the competition by carving sexy figurines? We may never find out.

* on page 183 of the same issue, I discovered that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch appears to be a proper geographic name now, as Nature spells it with capitals. Previous generations got to name islands, volcanoes and ocean currents. All that's left on this planet for us to put geographic names to is garbage. Sign of the times ?

* What I still haven't found out but need to know, is whether Tycho Brahe was murdered, and who did it. Any clues, let me know.

did the Neanderthals have autism ?

The short story on the back page of this weeks Nature (vol.453, p.562) has an interesting premise: that the Neanderthals developed the "nerdy" genes which in moderate doses make you good at maths and physics, while more extreme cases end up with autism. Easy to imagine that it's the lack of social cohesion that sealed their demise when they were competing against the more politically minded (and probably aggressive) Cro Magnon. The story suggests that the presence of autism genes in our population, which largely descends from Cro Magnon humans, is due to the (debated) interbreeding with Neanderthals.

The author, New Scientist correspondent Jeff Hecht, got one detail wrong -- the autism-related genes aren't dying out, as he suggests at the end of the story (which is set in a not-too distant future). On the contrary, the technological revolutions of the last two centuries, with the huge growth in demand for maths/phys/engineering type people, has ensured that the genes have spread and autism is much more common than it used to be when it was first described.