There’s no confusing Ludovic Slimak for just another hotel guest. It’s a sweltering Sunday afternoon in late August and we’ve arranged to meet in the car park of a guesthouse on the outskirts of Montélimar, southeastern France.

If you were a Neanderthal living in harsh conditions around 50,000 years ago, your number-one concern was getting enough to eat.

The design may be simple, but a chevron pattern etched onto a deer bone more than 50,000 years ago suggests that Neanderthals had their own artistic tradition before modern humans arrived on the scene, researchers said Monday.

When Neanderthals, Denisovans and homo sapiens met one another 50,000 years ago, these archaic and modern humans not only interbred during the thousands of years in which they overlapped, but they exchanged ideas that led to a surge in creativity, according to a leading academic.

Their eyes met across the rugged mountain landscape of prehistoric Romania. He was a Neanderthal, and stark naked apart from a fur cape. He had good posture and pale skin, perhaps reddened slightly with sunburn. Around one of his thick, muscular biceps he wore bracelet of eagle-talons.

A quarter of the way through Kindred, I was longing to meet a Neanderthal. By the end, I realized that we had met. She is in me — or at least, in my genes.

Nicola Davis speaks to Prof Jean-Jacques Hublin about new archaeological discoveries which reveal that modern humans co-existed with Neanderthals for several thousand years

https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2020/may/28/when-did-modern-humans-first-arrive-in-europe-podcast

Prof Clive Finlayson, director of the Gibraltar Museum, explains why some old assumptions about the intellectual capabilities of our evolutionary relatives, the Neanderthals persist today. But a body of evidence is increasingly forcing us to re-visit these old ideas.

When modern humans left Africa for Europe tens of thousands of years ago, they met Neanderthals and had sex with them. The evidence of those encounters remains inside most of us today; 2 to 3 percent of the DNA of non-African humans comes from Neanderthals.

For David Reich, research can be a harrowing experience. The 44-year-old Harvard University geneticist says he now goes to bed terrified he will wake up to find his team’s recent, stunning discoveries about human ancestry have been proved wrong.

When the ancestors of modern humans migrated out of Africa, they passed through the Middle East and Turkey before heading deeper into Asia and Europe.

Up to about 100,000 years ago, our human ancestors coexisted with Neanderthals in Europe and interbred with them for thousands of years. The Neanderthals eventually went extinct, but many of us still carry around fragments of Neanderthal DNA.

Teeth reflect our lifestyle, for better or for worse. And since teeth are so durable, they’re being used to rewrite some of what we know about our ancient ancestors.

Joachim Neander was a 17th-century Calvinist theologian who often hiked through a valley outside Düsseldorf, Germany, writing hymns. Neander understood everything around him as a manifestation of the Lord’s will and work. There was no room in his worldview for randomness, only purpose and praise.

When anthropologists discover a new set of hominid fossils, the first questions are obvious: What is this creature? Where does it fit in on the evolutionary tree? But it has to be hard not to look into the hollow eye sockets and also wonder: Were you more like me — or more like an animal?

It’s been nearly 160 years since we Homo sapiens, or “wise people,” first got an inkling through Charles Darwin and the discovery of Neanderthal remains that we are just another evolving species on this planet.

The ancestors of modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and another extinct line of humans known as the Denisovans at least four times in the course of prehistory, according to an analysis of global genomes published Thursday in the journal Science.

Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Svante Paabo sequenced Neanderthal genes but what does it tell us about modern humans?

In 1997, scientists found the first scrap of Neanderthal DNA in a fossil. Since then, they have recovered genetic material, even entire genomes, from a number of Neanderthal bones, and their investigations have yielded a remarkable surprise: Today, 1 to 2 percent of the DNA in non-African people comes from Neanderthals.

That genetic legacy is the result of interbreeding roughly 50,000 years ago between Neanderthals and the common ancestors of Europeans and Asians. Recent studies suggest that Neanderthal genes even influence human health today, contributing to conditions from allergies to depression.