Free Anthropology Essay Samples

[…] The Neanderthals were powerful hunters and 70,000 years ago they had occupied all Europe and western Asia (Shreeve, 1995, p.70 (“All about Neanderthals”, 2001). They differed from our species, Homo sapiens, by such appearance feature as prominent brows, wide noses, receding chins and foreheads, big teeth and heavy bones. Their thickset bodies kept heat, helping them to resist to a glacial cold of the Ice age. Their brains were larger but they have the lack of the mental skills, advanced tools and linguistic ability of first Homo sapiens.
Neanderthals occupied a large area from modern Great Britain east to Uzbekistan and south closely to the Red Sea (Alper, 2003). They lived in hard glacial period. But the Neanderthals adapted to live in such difficult age. The Neanderthals evidently became extinct by 25,000 B.C.
The life of Neanderthals is studied by many scientists. For a long time it was considered that Neanderthals were our human ancestors. However, the recent examination of mitochondrial DNA from Neanderthal remains found in 1856 states that there is no evidence of a relationship of Neanderthals with humans (Kunzig and Menon, 1998). According to the new study, Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis developed along different paths for more than half a million years (Kunzig and Menon, 1998).
Svante Paabo of the University of Munich and his colleagues examined the DNA from single Neanderthal, and from more than 1,600 modern Europeans, Africans, Asians, native Americans and Austra-lians, and Oceanians (Kunzig and Menon, 1998). They saw that a small stretch of DNA from a Neanderthal bone was not the same as as ours. So, it really suggests that Neanderthals were a separate species. […]