Neanderthals 'R' We
Neanderthals
are "the ancestors nobody wants," according to Kharlena Ramanan, the
keeper of a website
about Neanderthals.
Correction: almost nobody.
To David Frayer, a KU professor of anthropology, it's
quite thinkable that there's a bit of Neanderthal genetic material in
us.
Neanderthals disappeared from the face of the Earth
about 30,000 years before present. Frayer admits that his idea that
they were not a species apart is a minority opinion among anthropologists.
Frayer's not talking out of school, though. He's curator,
along with Anta Montet-White, another KU professor of anthropology,
of an exhibit called "Neanderthals in Kansas" that opened at the KU
Museum of Anthropology in December 1999 and ran through February.
(No, Dorothy, Neanderthals lived in the Near East and
Europe, never in Oz. But that doesn't mean you can't build an exhibit
around them here and give it a puckish name.)
The ticklish question of the relationship of Neanderthals
and modern humans surfaced again last June. At that time, parts of a
human skeleton, gender unknown, were discovered in a Portuguese valley.
They were dated to about 24,500 years before present.
Neanderthal and modern human features could both be
found in the remains, according to a couple of high-profile paleontologists,
Erik Trinkaus, of Washington University, and Joao Zilhao, director of
the Instituto Portugués de Arqueologia.
The press lathered up, calling the kid a "love child,"
as if members of two species had met, mated and produced a hybrid. Frayer
doesn't buy it. He disputes that a couple of skeletal features pointed
to by the other paleontologists as definitively Neanderthal are, in
fact, definitive.
For example, modern humans have a little bump behind
the ear known to scientists as the projecting mastoid. Was the kid's
lack of a bump, then, a Neanderthal feature?
Frayer says not: "This is an age-related feature. If
you looked at a modern kid who was 4 years old, he wouldn't have a projecting
mastoid either."
Neanderthals also, typically, had short shinbones relative
to their thigh bones. Trinkaus used that feature of the Portuguese skeleton
to argue that the 24,000-year-old kid was part Neanderthal.
Trouble is, the kid's shinbone is fragmentary, not whole,
Frayer says. Besides, many clearly modern children also have short shins,
yet that's not considered evidence that they're hybrids.
"There's no doubt to me that this is a modern kid,"
he says.
Through the years, Frayer says, those who contend that
Neanderthals are a separate species have developed a roster of skeletal
features they say define the Neanderthal.
"But when you survey the skeletal materials of humans
that followed the Neanderthals in Europe," Frayer says, "you find they
also possess these features, although at a lower frequency.
"If you say that Neanderthals have no ties to modern
humans, then you also have to say that the exact same features somehow
re-evolved in the new 'species,' and that's not very likely.
"More likely is that the features found in the earlier
populations were transferred to the later ones, that Neathderthals figure
in the ancestry of Europeans and that there is a connection."
Among paleontologists, Frayer says, there are lumpers
and splitters, people who want to use all kinds of subtle differences
among early peoples to set groups apart from each other and people who
want to emphasize the similarities. Frayer is a lumper.
Here's how the two groups might argue about a particular
kind of DNA that's found in cells.
It's called mitochondrial DNA, and its job is to produce
energy for use by the cell. Splitters would say that the mitochondrial
DNA extracted from Neanderthal remains and examined by scientists is,
on average, quite different from contemporary DNA.
As a good lumper, Frayer retorts, "There are humans
alive today who, in terms of their mitochondrial DNA, are more different
from each other than the Neanderthals were from modern humans."
Frayer likens the eclipse of Neanderthals in Europe
by modern humans to the displacement of Native Americans in the United
States.
"Europeans moved into the New World and displaced most
Indians," Frayer says, "but that doesn't mean American Indians are a
different species, right?"
Says Frayer, "When people of European descent use 'neanderthal'
as an insult, they're ridiculing a part of their own ancestry, a part
of themselves."
