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Article: You're not a Neanderthal after all. (DNA research shows that modern humans did not descend from Neanderthal man)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Newsweek
- Article date:
- July 21, 1997
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With their protruding brows and flat foreheads, Neanderthals have always had an image problem: dimwitted, slow to pick up on hip new tools--in short, the village idiot of humankind. Worse, many scientists argued that they were the ancestors of Homo sapiens, a thought that Uncle Harry tried to confirm at every Thanksgiving dinner. In this view, early humans and Neanderthals interbred, leading ultimately to modern Europeans. But a major study released in the journal Cell last week strongly confirms a newer theory: humans didn't descend from Neanderthals. Instead, Neanderthals, who lived in Europe and western Asia between 300,000 and 30,000 years ago, were an evolutionary ...