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Neanderthals: New Findings & Theories

Pietro published another article regarding this finding on a different thread.

Neanderthals gave us disease genes
By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25944817

Genes that cause disease in people today were picked up through interbreeding with Neanderthals, a major study in Nature journal suggests.

They passed on genes involved in type 2 diabetes, Crohn's disease and - curiously - smoking addiction.

Genome studies reveal that our species (Homo sapiens) mated with Neanderthals after leaving Africa.

But it was previously unclear what this Neanderthal DNA did and whether there were any implications for human health.

Continue reading the main story
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When Neanderthals and modern humans met and mixed, they were at the very edge of being biological compatible”

Prof David Reich
Harvard Medical School
Between 2% and 4% of the genetic blueprint of present-day non-Africans came from Neanderthals.

By screening the genomes of 1,004 modern humans, Sriram Sankararaman and his colleagues identified regions bearing the Neanderthal versions of different genes.

That a gene variant associated with the inability to stop smoking should be found to be of Neanderthal origin is a surprise.

It goes without saying that there is no suggestion our evolutionary cousins were puffing away in their caves.

Instead, the researchers argue, this gene may have more than one function; the modern effect of this genetic marker on smoking behaviour may be one impact among several.

Pastures new
Researchers found that Neanderthal DNA is not distributed uniformly across the human genome, instead being commonly found in regions that affect skin and hair.

This suggests some gene variants provided a rapid way for modern humans to adapt to the new cooler environments they encountered as they moved into Eurasia. When the populations met, Neanderthals had already been adapting to these conditions for several hundred thousand years.

The stocky hunters once covered a range stretching from Britain to Siberia, but went extinct around 30,000 years ago as Homo sapiens was expanding from an African homeland.

Neanderthal ancestry was found in regions of the genome linked to the regulation of skin pigmentation.

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I think what we're seeing to a large extent is the dying remains of this extinct genome as it is slowly purged from the human population”

Joshua Akey
University of Washington
"We found evidence that Neanderthal skin genes made Europeans and East Asians more evolutionarily fit," said Benjamin Vernot, from the University of Washington, co-author of a separate study in Science journal.

Genes for keratin filaments, a fibrous protein that lends toughness to skin, hair and nails, were also enriched with Neanderthal DNA. This may have helped provide the newcomers with thicker insulation against cold conditions, the scientists suggest.

"It's tempting to think that Neanderthals were already adapted to the non-African environment and provided this genetic benefit to (modern) humans," said Prof David Reich, from Harvard Medical School, co-author of the paper in Nature.

But other genes are implicated in human illnesses, such as type 2 diabetes, long-term depression, lupus, billiary cirrhosis - an autoimmune disease of the liver - and Crohn's disease. In the case of Crohn's, Neanderthals passed on different markers that increase and decrease the risk of disease.

Asked whether our ancient relatives actually suffered from these diseases too, or whether the genes in question only caused illness when transplanted to a modern human genetic background, Mr Sankararaman said: "We don't have the fine knowledge of the genetics of Neanderthals to answer this," but added that further study of their genomes might shed light on this question.

Joshua Akey, from the University of Washington, an author of the Science publication, added: "Admixture happened relatively recently in evolutionary terms, so you wouldn't expect all the Neanderthal DNA to have been washed away by this point.

"I think what we're seeing to a large extent is the dying remains of this extinct genome as it is slowly purged from the human population."

Desert regions
However, some regions of our genomes were discovered to be devoid of Neanderthal DNA, suggesting that certain genes had such harmful effects in the offspring of modern human-Neanderthal pairings that they have indeed been flushed out actively and rapidly through natural selection.

"We find that there are large regions of the genome where most modern humans carry little or no Neanderthal ancestry," Mr Sankararaman told BBC News.

"This reduction in Neanderthal ancestry was probably due to selection against genes that were bad - deleterious - for us."

The Neanderthal-deficient regions encompass genes that are specifically expressed in the testes, and on the X (female sex) chromosome.

This suggests that some Neanderthal-modern human hybrids had reduced fertility and in some cases were sterile.

"It tells us that when Neanderthals and modern humans met and mixed, they were at the very edge of being biologically compatible," said Prof Reich.

Another genome region that lacked Neanderthal genes includes a gene called FOXP2, which is thought to play an important role in human speech.

Joshua Akey said his team's results were compatible with there having been multiple pulses of interbreeding between modern humans and Neanderthals.

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Why did humans replace Neanderthals? Paleo diet didn't change, the climate did
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 084643.htm
Date: March 17, 2014. Source: Universitaet Tübingen

Fragment of jaw of a wolf from Le Moustier that was analyzed during the investigation.
Credit: Hervé Bocherens/University of Tübingen

Why were Neanderthals replaced by anatomically modern humans around 40,000 years ago? One popular hypothesis states that a broader dietary spectrum of modern humans gave them a competitive advantage on Neanderthals. Geochemical analyses of fossil bones seemed to confirm this dietary difference. Indeed, higher amounts of nitrogen heavy isotopes were found in the bones of modern humans compared to those of Neanderthals, suggesting at first that modern humans included fish in their diet while Neanderthals were focused on the meat of terrestrial large game, such as mammoth and bison.

However, these studies did not look at possible isotopic variation of nitrogen isotopes in the food resource themselves. In fact, environmental factors such as aridity can increase the heavy nitrogen isotope amount in plants, leading to higher nitrogen isotopic values in herbivores and their predators even without a change of subsistence strategy. A recent study published in Journal of Human Evolution by researchers from the University of Tübingen (Germany) and the Musée national de Préhistoire in Les Eyzies-de-Tayac (France) revealed that the nitrogen isotopic content of animal bones, both herbivores, such as reindeer, red deer, horse and bison, and carnivores such as wolves, changed dramatically at the time of first occurrence of modern humans in southwestern France.

The changes are very similar to those seen in human fossils during the same period, showing that there was not necessarily a change in diet between Neanderthals and modern humans, but rather a change in environment that was responsible for a different isotopic signature of the same food resources.

Moreover, this isotopic event coinciding in timing with the replacement of Neanderthals by modern humans may indicate that environmental changes, such as an increase of aridity, could have helped modern humans to overcome the Neanderthals.

These new results, together with recently published research showing that Neanderthals had more skills and exploited more diverse food resources than previously thought, makes the biological differences between these two types of prehistoric humans always smaller. In this context, the exact circumstances of the extinction of Neanderthals by modern humans remain unclear and they are probably more complex than just a behavioral superiority of one type of humans compared to the other.

Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Universitaet Tübingen.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Journal Reference:
Hervé Bocherens, Dorothée G. Drucker, Stéphane Madelaine. Evidence for a 15N positive excursion in terrestrial foodwebs at the Middle to Upper Palaeolithic transition in south-western France: Implications for early modern human palaeodiet and palaeoenvironment. Journal of Human Evolution, 2014; DOI: 10.1016/j.jhevol.2013.12.015
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So it looks as if we did inter-breed after all. Did we assimilate them? There are suggestions on this thread that we ate them.

New method confirms humans and Neanderthals interbred
April 8th, 2014

Technical objections to the idea that Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of Eurasians have been overcome, thanks to a genome analysis method described in the April 2014 issue of the journal Genetics. The technique can more confidently detect the genetic signatures of interbreeding than previous approaches and will be useful for evolutionary studies of other ancient or rare DNA samples.

"Our approach can distinguish between two subtly different scenarios that could explain the genetic similarities shared by Neanderthals and modern humans from Europe and Asia," said study co-author Konrad Lohse, a population geneticist at the University of Edinburgh.

The first scenario is that Neanderthals occasionally interbred with modern humans after they migrated out of Africa. The alternative scenario is that the humans who left Africa evolved from the same ancestral subpopulation that had previously given rise to the Neanderthals.

Many researchers argue the interbreeding scenario is more likely, because it fits the genetic patterns seen in studies that compared genomes from many modern humans. But the new approach completely rules out the alternative scenario without requiring all the extra data, by using only the information from one genome each of several types: Neanderthal, European/Asian, African and chimpanzee.

The same method will be useful in other studies of interbreeding where limited samples are available. "Because the method makes maximum use of the information contained in individual genomes, it is particularly exciting for revealing the history of species that are rare or extinct," said Lohse. In fact, the authors originally developed the method while studying the history of insect populations in Europe and island species of pigs in South East Asia, some of which are extremely rare.

Lohse cautions against reading too much into the fact that the new method estimates a slightly higher genetic contribution of Neanderthals to modern humans than previous studies. Estimating this contribution is complex and is likely to vary slightly between different approaches.

"This work is important because it closes a hole in the argument about whether Neanderthals interbred with humans. And the method can be applied to understanding the evolutionary history of other organisms, including endangered species," said Mark Johnston, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Genetics.

More information: K. Lohse and L.A.F. Frantz. Neandertal Admixture in Eurasia Confirmed by Maximum Likelihood Analysis of Three Genomes. Genetics April 2014 196:1241-1251 DOI: 10.1534/genetics.114.162396 http://www.genetics.org/content/196/4/1241

Provided by Genetics Society of America

"New method confirms humans and Neanderthals interbred." April 8th, 2014. http://phys.org/news/2014-04-method-hum ... erbred.htm
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l
 
Finger licking good.

Fowl play: Neanderthals were first bird eaters (Update)

Ancient pigeon bones reveal secrets of Neanderthals' bird diet

Cut-marked bone (ulna) of Rock Dove specimens from Gorham’s Cave Credit: Ruth Blasco et al., Scientific Reports


Neanderthals may have caught, butchered and cooked wild pigeons long before modern humans became regular consumers of bird meat, a study revealed on Thursday.

Close examination of 1,724 bones from rock doves, found in a cave in Gibraltar and dated to between 67,000 and 28,000 years ago, revealed cuts, human tooth marks and burns, said a paper in the journal Scientific Reports.

This suggested the doves may have been butchered and then roasted, wrote the researchers—the first evidence of hominids eating birds.
And the evidence suggested Neanderthals ate much like a latter-day Homo sapiens would tuck into a roast chicken, pulling the bones apart to get at the soft flesh.

"They liked what we like and went for the breasts, the drumsticks and the wings," study author Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum, told journalists of the bone analysis.

"They had the knowledge and technology to do this."

The scarred remains were from rock doves—a species that typically nests on cliff ledges and the entrance to large caves—and the ancestors of today's widespread feral pigeon. ...

Ancient pigeon bones reveal secrets of Neanderthals' bird diet
Photograph from the sea of Governor’s Beach, southeast side of the Rock, Gibraltar, showing Gorham’s Cave, which is the focus of this research. Credit: C. Finlayson

Yet at Gorham's Cave, "Neanderthals exploited Rock Doves for food for a period of over 40 thousand years, the earliest evidence dating to at least 67 thousand years ago," said the paper.

And these were not sporadic meals, as borne out by "repeated evidence of the practice in different, widely spaced" parts of the cave.
"Our results point to hitherto unappreciated capacities of the Neanderthals to exploit birds as food resources on a regular basis," the team wrote.

"More so, they were practising it long before the arrival of modern humans and had therefore invented it independently."
Even more human
Finlayson said the bone analysis added to a growing body of evidence that Neanderthals were more sophisticated than was once widely believed.
"This makes them even more human," he said. ...
.
"Fowl play: Neanderthals were first bird eaters (Update)." August 7th, 2014. http://phys.org/news/2014-08-ancient-pi ... crets.html
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Did they have Post-Modernists as well?

Neanderthal abstract art found in Gibraltar cave

Discovery is a significant shift in our understanding of human development,

First Neanderthal etching is a #stoneagehashtag

The oldest known example of abstract art has been discovered in a cave in Gibraltar. The work, a series of criss-crossed lines cut into stone, was carried out 40,000 years ago.

The work was created by Neanderthals, close relatives of modern humans, who until now had been considered incapable of abstract thought and expression.

"Creating paintings or carvings in caves is seen as a cognitive step in human development," said Joaquín Rodríguez-Vidal of the University of Huelva – one of the researchers whose study of the cave was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday.

"This behaviour was considered exclusive to modern humans and has been used as an argument to distinguish our direct ancestors from ancient man, including Neanderthals."

The discovery is "a major contribution to the redefinition of our perception of Neanderthal culture", prehistorian William Rendu of the French National Centre for Scientific Research told the Wall Street Journal. "It is new and even stronger evidence of the Neanderthal capacity for developing complex symbolic thought."

The work, uncovered in 2012 and measuring about one square metre, consists of eight lines cut deep into the rock that is arranged in two groups of three long cuts and two shorter ones. ...
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/s ... altar-cave
 
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Were Neanderthals a sub-species of modern humans?

Neanderthals were a distinct species: Study
IANS | Washington November 19, 2014 Last Updated at 13:22 IST

A team of US researchers has identified new evidence supporting the growing belief that Neanderthals were a distinct species separate from modern humans and not a subspecies of them.

In an extensive study led by SUNY Downstate Medical Center located in central Brooklyn, New York, the team looked at the entire nasal complex of Neanderthals and involved researchers with diverse academic backgrounds.

The findings show that the Neanderthal nasal complex was not adaptively inferior to that of modern humans and that the Neanderthals' extinction was likely due to competition from modern humans and not an inability of the Neanderthal nose to process a colder and drier climate.

Lead researcher Samuel Marquez, associate professor at SUNY Downstate's Department of Cell Biology, argues that studies of the Neanderthal nose have been approaching this anatomical enigma from the wrong perspective.

"Previous work has compared Neanderthal nasal dimensions to modern human populations such as the Inuit and modern Europeans, whose nasal complexes are adapted to cold and temperate climates," he noted.

However, the current study joins a growing body of evidence that the upper respiratory tracts of this extinct group functioned via a different set of rules as a result of a separate evolutionary history - resulting in a mosaic of features not found among any population of Homo sapiens.

"The strength of this new research lies in its taking the totality of the Neanderthal nasal complex into account rather than looking at a single feature. By looking at the complete morphological pattern, we can conclude that Neanderthals are our close relatives but they are not us," said co-author Jeffrey T. Laitman from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

According to Ian Tattersall from the American Museum of Natural History, this research will stimulate future research demonstrating once and for all that Homo neanderthalensis deserves a distinctive identity of its own.

The study was published in the journal The Anatomical Record.

http://www.business-standard.com/articl ... 470_1.html
http://phys.org/news/2014-11-neandertha ... umans.html
http://www.scienceclarified.com/He-In/H ... ution.html
 
First off Neanderthals were never thought of as a subspecies of humans as in homo sapines. Somewhere in the distant evolutionary past we had a common ancestor and we developed along two different branches. Homo is the human genus, which also includes Neanderthals and many other extinct species of hominid. Homo sapiens is the only surviving species of the genus Homo.
Secondly the 'inferior' adaptation to the climate has been discarded a long time ago, as more recent theories suggest we simply outcompeted them.
Sometimes a species will die out even if some part of them is better adapted to the environment, because another species outcompetes them due to some other adaptation that better fits them to the envrionment which they inhabit. Interestingly Neanderthals also had a bigger brain than us, yet even that didn't save them.
 
Actually, Loquaiciousness, I have seen the term homo sapiens neandertalensis in popular works on human paleontology co-written by professional paleontologists (often prominent ones) and popular science writers. Almost any possible position on the relationship between homo sapiens and other hominid species has been seriously proposed by somebody erudite, somewhere.

And a bigger brain is not necessarily "better." No direct correlation between brain size and intelligence has ever been found - partly because intelligence has never been properly defined.
 
At no point did I claim bigger brains meant higher intelligence, I was merely using it as a point to illustrate that what some might see as an evolutionary advantage a. mighn't be one, and b. even if it is doesn't necessarily lead to survival of the species.
Also, thanks for the lecture on IQ, I will remember that whilst marking my students' assignments on the subject, and next time I take a tutorial on this....
As for IQ not being properly defined, that's because there is no universally accepted agreement on what it actually is and it may well be culturally defined. As such IQ tests may therefore measure your ability to pass IQ tests rather than measure IQ, hence no correlations between the score and brain size. Personally, I don't believe bigger brains = higher IQ as this would imply men generally are more intelligent than women...... and there's another can of worms I have just opened.
 
Neanderthals probably suffered from psoriasis. They were susceptible to Crohn’s disease. They appear to have been capable of producing abstract designs. They made tools out of bone and, quite possibly, decorations out of feathers. These are some of the latest findings on our beetle-browed relatives—the studies seem to be arriving every few weeks now—and they’ve had the unsettling effect of making them seem ever more like us.

It is no longer news that Neanderthals and modern humans were similar enough to interbreed. That discovery made headlines worldwide when it was first announced, in the spring of 2010, by a team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig. “Humans and Neanderthals: Getting It On, After All,” a typical one read. (I wrote about the lead scientist responsible for this discovery, Svante Pääbo, in 2011.)

This “getting it on” left a lasting mark: even today, all non-Africans retain bits of Neanderthal DNA

Research published last year indicates that human-Neanderthal couplings were rare, and that the offspring they produced had fertility problems. This, in turn, suggests that Neanderthals were not so closely related to modern humans as to count as members of the same species. (Other recent research suggests that susceptibility to psoriasis and Crohn’s disease can be traced back to the common ancestor of humans and Neanderthals, and are traits shared by both species.)...

http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/neanderthals?mbid=social_twitter
 
Using the tooth to get to the truth.

Neanderthal communities divided some of their tasks according to their sex. This is one of the main conclusions reached by a study performed by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), published in the Journal of Human Evolution. This study, which analyzed 99 incisors and canine teeth of 19 individuals from three different sites (El Sidron, in Asturias -- Spain, L'Hortus in France, and Spy in Belgium), reveals that the dental grooves present in the female fossils follow the same pattern, which is different to that found in male individuals.

Analyses show that all Neanderthal individuals, regardless of age, had dental grooves. According to Antonio Rosas, CSIC researcher at the Spanish National Museum of Natural Sciences: "This is due to the custom of these societies to use the mouth as a third hand, as in some current populations, for tasks such as preparing the furs or chopping meat, for instance."

Rosas specifies that "what we have now discovered is that the grooves detected in the teeth of adult women are longer than those found in adult men. Therefore we assume that the tasks performed were different."

Other variables analyzed are the tiny spalls of the teeth enamel. Male individuals show a greater number of nicks in the enamel and dentin of the upper parts, while in female individuals these imperfections appear in the lower parts. ...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/02/150218123427.htm
 
Oddly, one of the theories as to why Neanderthals died out was that they did not practice division of labour.
 
I feel the conclusion regarding division of labour based upon grooves in teeth to be unsound. Did Neanderthal jaw geometry vary consistently between genders? What about the effects of underbite/overbite within tribal mating groups? Comparison with contemporary hunter-gatherers is at best sheer subjectivity.
 
Sounds pretty tacky and ostentatious, like Hercules with his lion skin. "Why yes, I did catch it myself..."
 
A study in Royal Society Open Science says that so called 'Neanderthal bone flutes' are no more than the damaged bones of cave bear cubs left by scavengers during the Ice Age.

The paper suggests that the 'flutes', which are often attributed as being the oldest musical instruments in the world, were misidentified when they were first discovered in the 1920s. The author of the paper, Cajus G. Diedrich, says the bones are the damaged remains of bear cubs left by the teeth of Ice Age spotted hyenas.

The cave bear bones, discovered in cave systems in Eastern Europe, appear to have aligned holes drilled into their lengths which makes them resemble broken flutes. In past work researchers have identified the holes as matching with a musical diatonic scale sequence, among the most widespread of musical scales known, and cited this as evidence that the bones are early musical instruments. Some musicians have even been able to create music from replicas of the bones.

Other researchers doubted the human origin of the markings on the bones and here Dr. Diedrich argues that his analysis of the markings and holes suggests that they were made by scavengers trying to get to the nutritious bone marrow inside the bone shafts. ...

http://phys.org/news/2015-04-neanderthal-bone-flutes-ice-age.html
 
Nearly 42,000 years ago, ancient humans began wielding a new kind of Stone Age toolkit in southern Europe—one that included perforated shell ornaments and long, pointed stone bladelets that were thrown long distances atop spears. Now, after decades of speculation about who made the tools, scientists have finally shown that they were crafted by modern humans, rather than Neandertals. The technological breakthrough may have helped our species outcompete Neandertals, who went extinct shortly after the new tools appeared in Europe.

The proof comes from a new state-of-the-art analysis of two baby teeth found in 1976 and 1992 at separate archaeological sites in northern Italy. At the time, researchers were unable to tell whether they belonged to modern humans or Neandertals. But in the new study, an international team of researchers led by Stefano Benazzi of the University of Bologna in Italy used three-dimensional digital imaging methods, including computerized tomography scans, to measure the thickness of the enamel of one of the teeth, found at the collapsed rock shelter of Riparo Bombrini in the western Ligurian Alps. The enamel was thick, as in modern humans, rather than relatively thin, as in Neandertals, the authors report online today in Science. And new radiocarbon dates on animal bones and charcoal from the site suggest this modern child lived there approximately 40,710 to 35,640 years ago. ...

http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/04/sophisticated-tools-may-have-spelled-doom-neandertals
 
How's that for a snappy headline. For years, scientists have been saying we have a lot of our DNA in common with chimpanzees, bonobos specifically. The figure often quoted is 96% or even higher. So you might say those remaining 4% is what makes us human. However, in recent years we've also found that it appears people outside of Africa have some neanderthal DNA in them. I hear figures of 2,5%. So to be blunt, wouldn't that mean that a person from Africa would in genetic percentages have more in common with a bonobo than with for example a scotsman? Physically they do seem quite close though, so I assume I am looking at the numbers in the wrong way. Is that the case?
 
Genetics don't work quite like that........ but it is true the average European carries approx 2-4% neanderthal genes. I do myself according to 23AndMe.
 
There was a savage dismemberment of the 23andMe/Britain'sDNA style of commercial 'toy genography' yesterday night on R4, which I initially thought was unfair until I heard their reasoning.

Effectively (as I re-understand it) it may be impossible not to have neanderthal genes, due to the inverse overlapping lineal descent (cf six degree of seperation effect).

An equally-bullish repudiation of 'geneastrology' lurks at http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/feb/25/viking-ancestors-astrology. Dammit!!
 
23andMe seems to be a dodgy company for several reasons.
 
Some genes will be in almost everything because they code for fundamental things like amino acids, protiens or DNA replication.
 
Yes, that is why we for example share around 25% of our DNA with trees.
 
DORSET, ENGLAND—An analysis of 30,000-year-old rabbit bones found in caves in the Iberian Peninsula suggests that rabbits were a crucial part of the modern human diet, but not in the diet of Neanderthals. “Rabbits originated in Iberia and they are a very special kind of resource, in that they can be found in large numbers, they are relatively easy to catch, and they are predictable. This means that they are quite a good food source to target. The fact that the Neanderthals did not appear to do so suggests that this was a resource they did not have access to in the same way as modern humans,” paleoecologist John Steward of Bournemouth University said in a press release. ...

http://www.archaeology.org/news/3389-150609-rabbits-neanderthal-extinction
 
Thousands of stone tools from the early Upper Paleolithic, unearthed from a cave in Jordan, reveal clues about how humans may have started organizing into more complex social groups by planning tasks and specializing in different technical skills.

The Journal of Human Evolution published a study of the artifacts from Mughr el-Hamamah, or Cave of the Doves, led by Emory University anthropologists Liv Nilsson Stutz and Aaron Jonas Stutz.

"We have achieved remarkably accurate estimates of 40,000 to 45,000 years ago for the earliest Upper Paleolithic stone tools in the Near East," Aaron Stutz says. "Our findings confirm that the Upper Paleolithic began in the region no later than 42,000 years ago, and likely at least 44,600 years ago."

The rich array of artifacts shows a mix of techniques for making points, blades, scrapers and cutting flakes. "These toolmakers appear to have achieved a division of labor that may have been part of an emerging pattern of more organized social structures," Stutz says.

The theory that greater social division of labor was important at this prehistoric juncture was first put forward by anthropologists Steven Kuhn and Mary Stiner.

"Our work really seems to support that idea," Stutz says. "The finds from Mughr el-Hamamah give us a new window onto a transitional time, on the cusp of modern human cultural behaviors, bridging the Middle and Upper Paleolithic."

This pivotal time also marked the ebbing of Neanderthals as a last wave of anatomically modern humans spread out from Africa and into the Near East. This region, also known as the Levant, comprises the eastern Mediterranean at the crossroads of western Asia and northeast Africa. As the final surge of modern humans passed through the Levant, they would likely have encountered human populations that arrived earlier, and they may also have interbred with Neanderthals. ...

http://phys.org/news/2015-06-stone-tools-jordan-dawn-division.html
 
Regarding my earlier question, what is it that I have gotten wrong?
 
That wasn't the question. I meant the one regarding percentages of neanderthal DNA.
 
"Early modern humans and Neanderthals now appear to have had similarly big brains at birth, that grew at similar rates. But the brains of today's babies are smaller than both of them. "Are they more efficiently organised? Or did we trade a bit of intelligence for smaller, cheaper brains that meant we could reproduce faster,"

I've been reading up a bit on the somewhat mysterious (and controversial) Boskop skulls, which have a cranial capacity well in excess of modern humans. If you ignore all the pseudo-science crap about aliens, there is some fascinating material out there about the "Boskopoid" race of ancient humans:

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/the-brain-2/28-what-happened-to-hominids-who-were-smarter-than-us
 
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