»neanderthals«

It's a rare event that pure science from a European institution makes it into a NY Times editorial (22.7.2006). This time it's the project by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome. "The hope is that the Neanderthal genome will answer basic questions about those hominids that scientists have been unable to resolve using only the fossil evidence. Could Neanderthals talk? Did they interbreed with humans? These are some of the things the genome might reveal.
But the real question to be answered is this: Which genes in our own genome do we share with Neanderthals and which belong uniquely to us?" asks the editorial of the NY Times.

New research suggests that the dispersal of anatomically modern Homo sapiens into Europe was more rapid than previously thought, writes John Noble Wilford in the NY Times (23.2.2006). " That, in turn, would mean that their coexistence with Neanderthals was briefer and that their introduction of cave art, symbolic artifacts and personal ornamentation occurred much earlier." Paul Mellars of Cambridge University, UK, believes that Neanderthals and the new arrivals overlap by only 6,000 years in Central and Northern Europe.