Forgotten museum bone fragments and children’s teeth uncover a new glimpse into Neanderthal life. A few minute Neanderthal bone fragments and teeth have opened a window onto the earliest phases of growth in our extinct cousins. New research indicates...

along Portugal’s coast, offering rare insight into ancient human activity. Archaeologists have uncovered a series of Neanderthal footprints on the southwestern shoreline of Portugal, dating to roughly 80,000 years ago. The impressions capture a mixture...

New research challenges the theory that climate change caused Neanderthal extinction, revealing their habitats remained stable and widespread. Popular imagination often paints Neanderthals as rugged survivors forged in the unforgiving chill of Ice Age...

millennia. The undisturbed sediment offered a rare, pristine glimpse into the lives of the chamber’s final inhabitants: Neanderthals. An Untouched Snapshot of Prehistory The interior of the chamber was littered with biological evidence that clearly...

A Turkish cave reveals new evidence that blurs the line between Neanderthals and modern humans, challenging long‑standing debates. Excavations in a Turkish limestone shelter have uncovered evidence that early modern humans may have carried forward many...

groups moving over long distances. There is no evidence for large migrations into the central Sahara at that time. No Neanderthal DNA Detected One of the most interesting findings involves Neanderthal ancestry. Most people outside Africa today carry...

Deep in a hidden cave, scientists discovered an ancient structure that suggests Neanderthals may have been far more sophisticated than previously believed. Deep beneath the darkness of Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France, archaeologists uncovered two...

of seemingly mundane bone fragments recovered from a Romanian cave have revealed a sophisticated, albeit overlooked, Neanderthal toolkit. While archaeologists had previously cataloged over 10,000 animal bone pieces at the Abri 122/1200 site in the...

New radiocarbon method pins down the age of Portugal’s Lapedo child, a prehistoric skeleton with both Neanderthal and modern human traits. Since its unearthing in 1998, the Lapedo child’s remains have been a focal point of archaeological debate....

New stone tool evidence suggests Neanderthals inhabited Saudi Arabia 55,000 years ago, but experts are questioning if the findings truly confirm their presence. A new analysis of lithic artifacts discovered in Saudi Arabia’s Nefud Desert suggests that...

A new spatial study of Des-Cubierta Cave in Spain shows that Neanderthals deliberately brought large horned animal skulls deep into a narrow gallery, placing them in the same area again and again. In the mountains north of Madrid, near Pinilla del...

between different human groups than scientists had previously been able to document. For years, discoveries involving Neanderthals and Denisovans have changed the way scientists think about human evolution. Instead of a simple family tree, the picture...

fragment displays a unique blend of characteristics. While the joint surface connecting to the elbow shares features with Neanderthals, the geometry of the bone’s neck and its overall profile align more closely with those of modern humans. Researchers...

paleoanthropologists due to its unique combination of anatomical traits that do not align perfectly with known human or Neanderthal populations. The fossil, which was missing its mandible, was encased in a thick crust of orange-brown calcite, with a...

Enrico Cappellini explained that while occasional loss of the AMELY gene has been documented in single human and Neanderthal males, an entire population lacking it would be unprecedented. Lee Berger, who oversaw the original digs, told Smithsonian...

have long shown that people outside Africa carry small fractions of DNA from extinct hominins, notably about 1–2 % from Neanderthals and additional Denisovan material in many Asian and Oceanian groups. These admixture events have shaped the genetic...

lived between roughly 1.2 million and 600 000 years ago, its skull bone dimensions align more closely with those of Neanderthals and modern humans than with earlier, more primitive relatives. Inside the Parietal Bones of Early European Hominins The...

making a new adaptation,” he explained. This reality is also reflected in our own history. Genetic evidence confirms that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbred during their migration out of Africa. These ancient unions left behind traces of...

the ancient DNA from the Siberian finger bone, they discovered a genetic signature that was distinctly human, yet neither Neanderthal nor Homo sapiens. As paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi noted in a NOVA production, researchers realized they had...