Neanderthals are often thought as an odd branch in the human family tree, but research now suggests that modern human is likely to be the odd man out.
"What people tend to do is draw a line from our ancestors straight to ourselves, and any group that doesn't seem to fit on that line is divergent, distinct, unusual, strange", researcher Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told LiveScience.
"But in terms of evolution of our family tree, the genus Homo, we are the outliers and the Neanderthals are more towards the core. It just happens that we happen to be alive today and Neanderthals are not".
Trinkaus focused on skeletal features that are most strongly linked to genetics, as opposed to any traits that might get influenced by lifestyle, environment or wear and tear. He discovered that Homo sapiens have roughly twice as many uniquely distinct traits as Homo neanderthaliensis.
In other words, Neanderthals are more like the other members of our family tree than modern humans are.
"In the broader sweep of human evolution, the more unusual group is not Neanderthals, whom we tend to look at as strange, weird and unusual, but it's us, modern humans. We are the only one who lack brow ridges. We are the only ones who have seriously shortened faces. We are the only ones with very reduced internal nasal cavities. We also have a number of detailed features of the limb skeleton that are unique." Trinkaus said.
Reexamination of discoveries from one of the most famous paleolithic sites in Europe changes our perspective on this species. They are often envisaged as "primitive" and that's why they were removed by modern people arrived from Africa. Sophisticated artifacts - like decorated bone points and personal ornaments - found in the Chatelperronian culture of France and Spain and dated 44 000 years ago were genuinely associated with Neanderthals, rather than achieved by the nearby modern humans.
The site where this Neanderthal culture was discovered is the Grotte de Fees at Chatelperron in Central France, first studied in 1840's. The return of the Neanderthals to the site after being inhabited by modern people supported the idea that cultural novelties seen among the latest Neanderthals represented imitation or borrowing, not innovation.
The stratigraphic pattern of Grotte des Fees proved to be false; the supposedly Neanderthal levels, from above those belonging to the modern human Aurignacian culture, were in fact back dirt from 19th century fossil hunting.
According to professor Joao Zilhao from Bristol University and his French colleagues, this confirms the evidence from other sites that the Neanderthals already had the capacity of symbolic thinking before the arrival of Homo sapiens into Western Europe around 40,000 years ago.
"This discovery, along with research on the rock strata at other cave sites, has huge implications for how we view the European Neandertals and, more widely, human evolution. The differences between Neandertals and modern humans may be much less than had been previously thought, suggesting that human cognition and symbolic thinking may date back to before the two sub-species split around 400,000 years ago." said professor Zilhao.
The Neanderthals appeared some 350 000 years ago and inhabited Europe and Western Asia. 50 000 years ago they vanished from Asia and 30 000 years ago from Europe. The reasons for their extinction it is still a subject of debate.
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