How much Neanderthal DNA do people outside Africa carry on average?
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One to two percent
The legacy of shared children after the migration out of Africa. Some of those genes still affect immunity, skin and sleep.
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Foto: AquilaGib · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the name Neanderthal come from?
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From the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf
Quarry workers found the first recognised bones there in 1856. The valley itself is named after hymn writer Joachim Neander: whose family name was actually Neumann.
How did the Neanderthal brain compare with ours in size?
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Slightly larger on average
About 1,500 against roughly 1,350 cubic centimetres. Size alone says little about thinking: the proportions of brain regions differed.
Did Neanderthals walk stooped and shuffling?
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No
That image goes back to a 1911 reconstruction of an old, severely arthritic skeleton. Neanderthals stood and walked as upright as we do.
When did the Neanderthals live?
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From about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago
Across Europe and western Asia as far as Siberia. Their last refuges probably lay in the south of the Iberian Peninsula.
Foto: Neanderthal-Museum, Mettmann · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Why were Neanderthals stocky with short forearms and shins?
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It was an adaptation to cold
A compact body has less surface relative to volume and loses less heat: the same principle shows in people living in Arctic regions today.
Which technically demanding adhesive did Neanderthals produce?
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Birch tar
Birch bark must be heated to several hundred degrees without oxygen: a multi-stage process requiring planning and control of fire.
What was found in Spanish grottoes in 2018 that predates the arrival of Homo sapiens in Europe?
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Neanderthal cave paintings
Red lines, dots and hand stencils dated to at least 64,000 years. That would make Neanderthals the first known cave painters; the dating is still debated.
What do healed severe injuries and toothless old skeletons prove?
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That the sick were cared for over long periods
The famous "old man of La Chapelle" survived with an almost toothless jaw and severe arthritis: hardly possible alone.
Whose team sequenced the Neanderthal genome in 2010?
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Svante Pääbo's team
At the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig: awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Medicine. Only the genome turned suspicion into certainty: there were shared children.
What is today's most likely explanation for their disappearance?
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A combination of climate, small groups and displacement
No "war of species" is documented. Small, isolated populations with little genetic diversity are fragile: slight disadvantages add up over millennia.
Which anatomical find suggests Neanderthals could speak?
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A hyoid bone like ours
The find from Kebara Cave in Israel matches the modern hyoid and Neanderthals carried the same variant of the speech gene FOXP2 as we do.
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