Alley Oop's uncles and aunts

[Bob Of Burleson]

Neanderthal ancestors in Spain
point to “Game of Thrones”
era of human prehistory

By Joel Achenbach
The Washington Post

In a cave in northern Spain, a team of scientists has retrieved the remains of 28 prehistoric humans, members of an enigmatic species that could be described as a little bit Neanderthal.

They had Neanderthal faces, with heavy brows and protruding noses. They had powerful mandibles and mouths that could open extremely wide, indicating that they used their teeth as gripping tools. But they didn’t have the large skulls or other robust skeletal features seen in the prototypical Neanderthals who, hundreds of millennia later, roamed Ice Age Europe.

These were apparently ancestors of Neanderthals, inhabitants of a line that many thousands of years earlier had split from the ancestors of modern humans. An international team of scientists published the description of the Spanish fossils Thursday in the journal Science but has not yet given this population a new species name. That will come later, the scientists said, after consultations with colleagues.

The discovery does not dramatically change the general picture of human evolution, but it complicates it a bit, providing new evidence that there were many distinct, and largely isolated, human species existing simultaneously and sometimes competing with one another in a harsh environment marked by advancing and retreating ice sheets.

The lead author of the new paper, paleoanthropologist Juan Luis Arsuaga of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, refers to this as “a ‘Game of Thrones’ scenario.”

As he put it, there was no Middle Pleistocene kingdom ruling over everything, but rather many competing houses vying for the same land.

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