The Neandertal type site revisited: Interdisciplinary investigations of skeletal remains from the Neander Valley, Germany

Abstract

The 1856 discovery of the Neandertal type specimen (Neandertal 1) in western Germany marked the beginning of human paleontology and initiated the longest-standing debate in the discipline: the role of Neandertals in human evolutionary history. We report excavations of cave sediments that were removed from the Feldhofer caves in 1856. These deposits have yielded over 60 human skeletal fragments, along with a large series of Paleolithic artifacts and faunal material. Our analysis of this material represents the first interdisciplinary analysis of Neandertal remains incorporating genetic, direct dating, and morphological dimensions simultaneously. Three of these skeletal fragments fit directly on Neandertal 1, whereas several others have distinctively Neandertal features. At least three individuals are represented in the skeletal sample. Radiocarbon dates for Neandertal 1, from which a mtDNA sequence was determined in 1997, and a second individual indicate an age of Ϸ40,000 yr for both. mtDNA analysis on the same second individual yields a sequence that clusters with other published Neandertal sequences.

Review Paper. Ancient DNA

“…The retrieval of putative Neanderthal mtDNA sequences (Krings et al 1997(Krings et al , 1999(Krings et al , 2000Ovchinnikov et al 2000;Schmitz et al 2002) is the major highlight in ancient human DNA studies because it allowed direct testing of hypotheses about the origin of the modern human gene pool. Importantly, recent suggestions that ancient sequences such as the Neanderthal results might be due to PCR artefacts (Pusch & Bachmann 2004) appear unjustified, and may result from poor experimental design and methodology (Serre et al 2004b).…”

Analysis of one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA

“…Phylogenetic analysis showed that it falls outside the variation of contemporary humans and shares a common ancestor with mtDNAs of present-day humans approximately half a million years ago 5,6 . Subsequently, mtDNA sequences have been retrieved from eleven additional Neanderthal specimens: Feldhofer 2 in Germany 7 , Mezmaiskaya in Russia 8 , Vindija 75, 77 and 80 in Croatia 9,10 , Engis 2 in Belgium, La Chapelle-aux-Saints and Rochers de Villeneuve in France 10 , Scladina in Belgium 11 , Monte Lessini in Italy 12 , and El Sidron 441 in Spain 13 . Although some of these sequences are extremely short, they are all more closely related to one another than to modern human mtDNAs 9,11 .…”

Revised direct radiocarbon dating of the Vindija G 1 Upper Paleolithic Neandertals

“…modern human remains has been assigned to either later phases of the Upper Paleolithic [Cro-Magnon (France), La Rochette (France), and Konȇprusy (Czech Republic) (10)(11)(12)] or the Holocene [Engis (Belgium), Hahnöfersand (Germany), St. Prokop (Czech Republic), Velika Pećina (Croatia), and Vogelherd (Germany) (13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)]. Direct and indirect dating has placed several Neandertal specimens at the beginning and the middle of this chronological period [Arcy-sur-Cure (Grotte du Renne, France), Feldhofer (Germany), Saint-Césaire (France), and Zaskalnaya (Ukraine) (19)(20)(21)(22)] and has placed others toward the more recent end in the cul-de-sac of Iberia [Cabezo Gordo (Spain), Columbeira (Portugal), Figueira Brava (Portugal), and Zafarraya (Spain) (23)(24)(25)]. Moreover, two Neandertals from Vindija Cave in Croatia yielded radiocarbon determinations at the end of this transitional period (15).…”