mark francis
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The fact that Neanderthals have no modern human DNA is a bigger problem than most secularists realize. What that means is that if Neanderthals and modern humans did interbreed, then it was only Neanderthal women mating with modern human men, and no modern human women mated with Neanderthal men, a scenario that strains credibility.
'Simply did not work': Mating between Neanderthals and modern humans may have been a product of failed alliances, says archaeologist Ludovic Slimak | Live Science 2-7-24
'Simply did not work': Mating between Neanderthals and modern humans may have been a product of failed alliances, says archaeologist Ludovic Slimak
By Tia Ghose
published about 17 hours ago
"When two populations are close to one another but they are very distinct — maybe they can have a different language and different traditions, they are in neighboring territories — they are going to exchange their women."
A man looks at a Neanderthal women in these two reconstructions. (Image credit: mauritius images GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo)
Since the late 1800s, we've known that other types of humans once roamed our planet. At that time, scientists recognized that fossils unearthed in caves across Europe belonged to archaic humans now known as Neanderthals. Over that time, our understanding of Neanderthals has undergone dramatic upheavals. ...
Ludovic Slimak, an explorer and archaeologist at the Centre for Anthropobiology and Genomics of Toulouse in France, has been fascinated by archaeology since he was 5 and has spent more than 30 years hunting for our closest human relatives in caves on nearly every continent. He spoke with Live Science about his new book, "The Naked Neanderthal: A New Understanding of the Human Creature" (Pegasus Books, 2024), about why Neanderthals are not simply another version of Homo sapiens, what their mating with modern humans tells us about our first and last encounters with them, and what they reveal about our own human nature.
Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Tia Ghose: How did you first become interested in Neanderthals?
Ludovic Slimak: I must have been maybe 18 years old. So very, very early, I spent a lot of time tracking this kind of human. I wrote my first book, "Naked Neanderthal," after more than 30 years of quest for those creatures.
[There's a] certain perception of a Neanderthal like a beast, or since 20 to 40 years [ago] in Europe, we have another perception of Neanderthals like another "ourselves." And I think, after working so many times on millions of Neanderthal tools, searching for them in caves everywhere, I think that all that was just wrong.
The important thing about this book is that, with my very precise knowledge of these populations, I use Neanderthals to try to understand what we are — us, sapiens on Earth. By defining "What is a Neanderthal?" in fact, I created this mirror that allows us to talk about us, and to define us and to understand what we are and where eventually we are going.
TG: The image of the Neanderthal when I was growing up was subhuman on some level. But in recent years, we've learned that Neanderthals and humans mated at multiple points. Not only did they mate, but obviously those offspring went on to have children such that our DNA has their DNA in it. How do you think that's changed our understanding of who they were? Or does it?
LS: We use the fact that — look, all sapiens today, to different degrees, we all have a certain degree of Neanderthal DNA — and [use it to say], "OK, so they did not disappear. We all came together, and we created a new humanity."
And, in fact, that's not what it's saying, the DNA, at all. When you are searching for ancient DNA [from 40,000 to 45,000 years ago] … all these early sapiens have recent Neanderthal DNA, and that's why we have [Neanderthal DNA] today. But when you reach and you try to extract DNA from the last Neanderthals, contemporaries of these early sapiens — let's say between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago — there's not a single Neanderthal with sapiens DNA. [Editor's Note: except a newly studied 122,000-year-old Neanderthal from Siberia].
Related: Are Neanderthals and Homo sapiens the same species?
And this is something incredibly important in terms of cultural anthropology, because the exchange of genes is never a love affair. In every traditional society, it's the question of the identities we are going to build between two groups, and that's what we call patrilocality.
When two populations are close to one another but they are very distinct — maybe they can have a different language and different traditions, they are in neighboring territories — they are going to exchange their women. That means that the women have the mobility; that means that my sister will go into your group …
TG: They come to a place to marry and have kids, right?
LS: … But if we do that, your sister will come into my group, and with that, we will become brothers, and we will come all together and become one larger and more powerful group. That's something universal in anthropology.
And we know also by DNA that this question of patrilocality, the mobility of women, was also the same thing for Neanderthals.
But when we see what happened at the moment of the contact, we see that all sapiens have Neanderthal DNA, and there's not a single Neanderthal with sapiens DNA.This is a major issue to understand the extinction and the precise interaction between the two populations.
Your sister, your Neanderthal sister, will come with me among my sapiens group, but my sister won't come with you. It's very rare, but it happens when there's a total war between two populations. And in that case, you consider that the other group are the transgressors of certain taboos and they are no longer humans. You will kill everybody, but you will keep the children, the women with you.
I don't say that there was genocide at all here between sapiens and Neanderthals. That could have happened in certain regions, but I don't think that's the process of extinction of Neanderthals.
What could have happened? I think that, OK, they have exchanged their sisters. But the genetic differences between the two populations were so important that then they must have tried and it did not work. And we know by DNA that when these two populations met together and they had children — and these children, if they were male, they were sterile or they couldn't survive. And so I think that the population tried a lot to exchange and to have alliances between the populations, and that simply did not work.
TG: So are you saying that all of the mating would have been between Neanderthal women going to Homo sapiens' communities, having female children, and then those are the only children who passed on their genes?
LS: It's very likely that we have a process that must work like that. But we also, of course, must keep in mind that our understanding, the value of ancient DNA, is very partial.
