Neanderthaler

Our lost cousins, the Neanderthals

New research suggests they were far more similar to us than we thought. So why did our nearest relations really disappear?

Sebastian Willnow/AFP via Getty Images/file 2004

Almost human: A photographer snapped pictures of a reconstruction of a Neanderthal at a German museum in 2004.

By Ruth GrahamGlobe Correspondent  February 13, 2015

In the nearly 160 years since humans first stumbled on evidence of Neanderthals in Europe, we have struggled to know what to think about these now deceased cousins of ours. “The more we learn about this beast-man the stranger he becomes to us,” the science-fiction writer HG Wells wrote in a 1921 story titled “The Grisly Folk,” which depicted Neanderthals as hideous primitive cannibals. “As well might we try to dream and feel as a gorilla dreams and feels.” For Wells, the real-life story had a happy ending: Some time after humans migrated into their territory from the south, the Neanderthals, who had flourished in Eurasia for at least 200,000 years, vanished from the earth.

With their large brains and human-like skeletons, Neanderthals have always been recognized as special. Though they are not our direct ancestors—their branch of the family tree has been cut off permanently—they are more similar to Homo sapiens than any other extinct mammals of their era. But something killed them off, and since we discovered their remains, the question of exactly why they died and we lived has enthralled us. “It’s highly controversial. There are all kinds of theories,” said Pat Shipman, a retired adjunct professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. “And there’s not a lot of resolution.”
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