7 Scientists Get Inside the Mind (and Genes) of the Neanderthal
Two studies offer new perspectives on the nature and fate of our nearest relative...

9 Ancient Fish Fills Missing Link
Tiktaalik fills in the transition between fish and the first animals to walk onto land...

37 Little Lucy Found
A 3-year-old female Australopithecus afarensis, the oldest remains of a child hominid ever found...


40 New Dinosaur King Rears Its Head
Spinosaurus measured as much as a dozen feet longer than the largest known T. rex...

59 Fossilized Frog Marrow Found
Researchers in Madrid reported the first example of fossilized bone marrow...

66 Hobbit Wars Heat Up
Evidence from 2006 has sharpened speculation about humanlike bones discovered in an Indonesian cave...

85 Dodo's Lost World Resurrected
While a few dodo bones and one skeleton remain in museums, they aren't enough to tell biologists exactly why or how the birds went extinct...

94 Tough Times for Tyrannosaur Teens
Life was rough for teen tyrannosaurs, according to paleontologist Gregory Erickson...

7 Scientists Get Inside the Mind (and Genes) of the Neanderthal

For a span of 200,000 years or more, Neanderthals thrived from Gibraltar to Uzbekistan. Big-brained and robust, they weathered the depths of the last ice age, only to vanish around 30,000 years ago, about when modern humans entered Europe. Did the new arrivals annihilate the natives, or were Neanderthals absorbed by interbreeding? Two studies offer new perspectives on the nature and fate of the Neanderthals. One is a project devoted to analyzing Neanderthal DNA; the other is a reconstruction of hunting strategies that suggests the Neanderthals were not slow-witted brutes unable to compete with modern humans.

Archaeologist Daniel Adler from the University of Connecticut, working with David Lordkipanidze and Nikolaz Tushabramishvili of the Georgian State Museum and their colleagues at the University of Haifa, Hebrew University, and Harvard University, analyzed animal remains in a rock shelter in the Republic of Georgia that was used by Neanderthals and later by modern humans. Apparently, Neanderthals and modern humans hunted the same prey in the same way. Their favored quarry was a large, fleet mountain goat called the Caucasian tur. "We saw again and again that Neanderthals were hunting the prime-age adults—the fastest, the most nutritious, but also the hardest ones to capture," says Adler. Hunting such difficult prey requires a high degree of cooperation and communication and a detailed understanding of the goats' seasonal routines, he notes. "Our study indicates very clearly that Neanderthals were not only good hunters, they were the top predators in whatever environment they occupied; they were the most dangerous thing in town."


Courtesy of Dennis Finnin/American Museum of Natural History
Still, Adler notes that "while modern humans didn't have an edge in hunting, they did seem to form larger social networks. We tested this by looking at the stone tools and what kind of stone the artifacts were made of. All the Neanderthal artifacts were made of stone they could find locally, within three miles. Modern humans, on the other hand, had artifacts made of material that you could only find at least 60 miles away, so they would have had to negotiate relationships with other modern humans. In times of trouble a modern human group would have some other group to turn to for help, whereas a Neanderthal group didn't. So if modern humans suddenly appeared in your territory, and you didn't know the other Neanderthal groups around you, you would have nowhere to turn. You'd be in big trouble."

Then again, modern humans may have formed more widespread alliances merely because their population density was higher. If the Neanderthals didn't lose out because of their inferior social skills, maybe they interbred with modern humans and simply disappeared into the larger population. In that case, some Neanderthal DNA should still be afloat in the modern gene pool. Svante Pääbo, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, may soon be able to address both issues.

In 2006 Pääbo managed to extract DNA from a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton in Croatia. "Our goal for the next two years is to create a rough draft of the Neanderthal genome," he says. He is particularly keen to study a gene called FOXP2, believed to be involved in muscle control of the larynx. If the Neanderthal gene resembles the one in modern humans, that would suggest that Neanderthals had linguistic abilities equal to our own. The genome map will also refine our family tree. Our ancestors may have gotten up to 25 percent of their DNA from Neanderthals—including genes for red hair and pale skin and possibly a gene linked to brain size. "The only way to clarify this is to study a Neanderthal and get the hard data," says Pääbo. We won't really know what it means to be human until we understand what it meant to be a Neanderthal.

Tim Folger

9 Ancient Fish Fills Missing Link

Excavations carried out over six years in the treeless, grassless, soil-less Ellesmere Island in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, 750 miles from the North Pole, have yielded a remarkable treasure: a 375-million-year-old, scaly, fin-legged, flat-headed, swivel-necked creature called Tiktaalik roseae. Named after the Inuit word for "large shallow-water fish," Tiktaalik fills in one of the most significant gaps in evolutionary history—the transition between swimming fish and the first animals to walk onto land.


Courtesy of Ted Daeschler/Academy of Natural Sciences
Paleontologist Neil Shubin, of the University of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History, and his colleague Ted Daeschler, of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, planned their Arctic search with great care. Three hundred seventy-five million years ago, the Canadian Arctic was near the equator, with a subtropical climate—a plausible place for an aquatic creature to venture from surf to turf. "Looking at the evolutionary tree, and knowing something about evolution and Earth history, we predicted there would be a Tiktaalik-like creature up there," Shubin says.

The four- to nine-foot-long creature had fins, which held limblike bones forming a shoulder, elbow, and wrist that could do a push-up; broad ribs and scales; and a neck that allowed the animal to swivel its head. "That the skull was disconnected from the shoulder is something we would not have expected in an animal that was still a fish," Daeschler says. "Our hypothesis is that it was an adaptation to shallow water and gave the animal more ability to hunt."

"What is really exceptional about Tiktaalik is that it is not some esoteric branch of evolution," Shubin says. "We are not looking at an evolutionary dead end. When we look at the origin of the neck in Tiktaalik, the origin of the wrist in Tiktaalik, we are talking about human history. We can trace our own history back to things like this. The transition we are seeing in these Devonian fish is a piece of our distant past."

Kathy A. Svitil 

Will we push fish of the seas into extinction by 2050?

37 Little Lucy Found


Courtesy of Zeresenay Alemseged
When paleoanthropologist Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Planck Institute in Germany first saw what appeared to be tiny hominid remains encased in 3.3-million-year-old sandstone in northern Ethiopia—just miles from where the famous Lucy skeleton was found 32 years earlier—he knew he had found something special. After five years of painstakingly extricating bones from sandstone, he was rewarded with the near-complete skeleton of a 3-year-old female Australopithecus afarensis, the oldest remains of a child hominid ever found.

Such fossils are exceedingly rare, partly because a child's remains are smaller and more likely to have been scattered by predators. Also, at that age the skeleton consists mostly of cartilage, which is more vulnerable to decay than bone. The ancient toddler shows key anatomical features of A. afarensis, including a shoulder blade midway in shape between that of a human and a gorilla, along with features rarely seen, like a full set of both baby and adult teeth. "To me, the most exciting part is the face," says Alemseged. "We no longer have to extrapolate from adults what a child looked like, because we can finally look at her."

Jocelyn Selim

Were our ancestors not the monogamous apes we thought they were?