After this week’s reading and lectures I found the Neanderthals to be more interesting due to their closeness in modern humans and how they are really important to human evolution. Also, I had never heard about them before this week. The Neanderthals had larger brains than the modern human. Their brain was about 1520 ccs and the modern human is about 1350-1400ccs. This is interesting because we have been talking about how these different species had significantly smaller brains than the modern human. Now, we learn about a species that has a larger brain. Even though the Neanderthals are similar to the modern human they have different brains. This was found when Neanderthal child skeleton from the site of Devil’s Tower in Gibraltar showed that the child was three years old but by looking at the anatomy of its brain it looked like a 4 or 5 year old human. This showed that Neanderthals were really advanced and had to mature a lot quicker. Another difference between Neanderthals and the modern human are the fact that Neanderthals were their ability to adapt to extreme cold temperatures. This is related to their larger brains because they had to produce more heat.
Scientists wonder if Neanderthals could speak or not. There is not a definite answer as if they could or couldn’t but their brain was quite large and they probably needed some type of language for hunting. Also, scientists have recently found that they had the FOXP2 gene, and this gene is related to speech in humans. Their brains were a lot more complex than any other species.
Neanderthal DNA has given scientists a lot of information that has helped show evidence of human evolution. There are ways in which we are related to Neanderthals and ways in which we are not. The last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans occurred between 700,000 and 516,000 kya. Scientists identified evidence of crossbreeding but not that much.
Hi Alexis, I really enjoyed your blog post! I agree with your perspective about the Neanderthals. One fact I found interesting that you mentioned in your post was “This was found when Neanderthal child skeleton from the site of Devil’s Tower in Gibraltar showed that the child was three years old but by looking at the anatomy of its brain it looked like a 4 or 5 year old human.” This fact is intriguing to me because I was shocked to hear this. The complexity of their brains was more than any other species. I also enjoyed how you brought up the FOXP2 gene, which contributed to their complexity of their brains. One interesting fact I enjoyed from the lecture was how the The Neanderthals developed faster than modern humans during childhood.
Hi Alexis!
I also found the Neanderthals to be a little more interesting to me personally, it was a species I wasn’t familiar with before this week. I really liked how you talked in detail about the differences in brain sizes between Neanderthals and modern humans. I knew, after going through all of this week’s content, that the Neanderthals had great adaptability when it came to extreme cold and dry temperatures. What I didn’t connect right off the bat like you did was that this was related to their larger brains since they had to produce more heat than us modern humans typically do. I found it so intriguing that the FOXP2 gene, the gene related to speech in humans, was found in Neanderthals even though there isn’t evidence they could speak.