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.

Scientists are planning to solve one of the world’s greatest archaeological mysteries.

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

In August 1856, limestone quarry workers blasting out the entrance to the Feldhofer grotto in the Neander Valley of west-central Germany found a set of skeletal remains.

Researchers who studied the bones of Homo floresiensis, a species of tiny human discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, say their findings should end a popular theory that it evolved from an ancestor of modern humans.

Scientists are debating about a possible return of the Neanderthal. With stem cell technology breaking through elsewhere and a complete sequence of the Neanderthal genome at hand, it’s seemingly only a matter of time or resources… This article was originally published on pionic.

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?

What a waste are two thumbs on the space bar. There they sit, nearly flaccid, punctuating the end of each word, awaiting the call to crack stone or to use sharp flakes to incise wood. It is easy to think of other traits as making us human.

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.

Eating raw meat and making stone tools may be behind the smaller teeth and faces of humans compared with their ancient relatives. Meat and tools, not the advent of cooking, was the trigger that freed early humans to develop a smaller chewing apparatus, a study suggests.

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.

Neanderthals were driven to extinction by competition with modern humans – with the latter's "higher culture level" giving them a competitive edge that pushed the species to extinction.

Diminutive humans that died out on an Indonesian island some 15,000 years ago were not Homo sapiens but a different species, according to a study published Monday that dives into a fierce anthropological debate.

For a long time, archaeologists have suggested that modern humans wiped out Neanderthals because we had greater technological and cultural development, which allowed us to find and exploit resources more readily than Neanderthals did.

The last sex between Neanderthals and modern humans likely occurred as recently as 47,000 years ago, suggests research detailed online Oct.