For this post, I would like to focus on Neanderthals. I believe Neanderthals pose for a big contribution to the to human diversity. First, I want to bring up their features such as brain size and their development. From our lectures, it has been said that these species contain larger brain sizes than the actual modern human with the brain size being 1520cc. I find this very interesting because the creativity and organization is so much less than the modern human that it would be hard to believe that these species could’ve had a larger brain. The development of Neanderthals is also amazing due to their physical features portraying a certain age, but the aspects such as cranial anatomy showing the child to be 2 years older than the physical aspects. If we take into consideration the last common ancestor between the Neanderthals and modern humans, it is said to be a gap of 700-516 kya. There is a lot of similarity between modern humans and these species. For one, paleoanthropologist might take into consideration of how the genes within these species are the same. The Foxp2 gene within humans, known as the speech gene, is also something that was identified in Neanderthals. The way in which us as humans function is through communication. Similarly, Neanderthals needed to communicate due to their extensive hunting strategies with the upgraded tools they contained. Anthropologist Svante Paabo, from the video link the Neanderthal in us, discussed his opinion about the human chromosome very well. He says that even if he looks at a certain loci in the human genome, it can show indication of someone being related to another individual, however going down to a different loci of the same chromosome, it can show that an individual can be more closely related to a Neanderthal than another individual. Furthermore, this is an indication that Neanderthal genome is a huge part of the modern human genome. The video also states that Neanderthals and early modern humans mixed. We must also consider the portion of the lecture talking about the spread to Europe, Asia, and Africa. The video states that there is a huge gap between Asia and Europe with Africa and the Neanderthal genes. This can be indication how the species might have split up back millions of years ago. I found it interesting that early modern humans had left Africa and encountered Neanderthals in the Middle East which I didn’t think about while studying the lecture. This is a huge indication of mixing between Neanderthals and humans. This explains so much why humans contain portions of the genome to be in relation to Neanderthals. This is definitely considered to be a greater contribution to the study of human diversity due to being able to interpret how humans are closely related to Neanderthals. This gives paleoanthropologist the ability to get even more information on our closest ancestors and figure out the true lineage and how or when species began to disappear and form into early modern humans and Homo sapiens.