Saturday Science: Neanderthals

I was sort of musig about nothing in particular when the question popped into my head: Where did Neanderthals originate? So I started googling around and ran across this article, which tells you all you ever wanted to kow about Neanderthals.

We know more facts about Neanderthals than any other extinct humans. Many thousands of their artefacts and fossils have been found, including several nearly complete skeletons.

We also know about their genetic make-up, as several Neanderthal genomes have now been reconstructed from ancient DNA obtained from their fossils

. As for my original question, this author maintains that Neanderthals originated in Ekurope or Adia perhaps as much as 500,000 years ago. This, of coure, depends on the distribution of our common ancestor -- Neanderthals are now considereed to be a separate species, closely related to Homo sapiens but distinct.

At any rate, do read the article -- it's somewhat lengthy, but very informative and quite fascainating,