The Wandering Ape

The Neanderthal is the most famous of our extinct human relatives. Few people don't know the name, but fewer still know what their daily lives were like in the midst of the Ice Age. Thanks to an incredible number of scientific discoveries in recent decades, we now have a much clearer picture. The day we learned that we had shared the planet with other humans, 167 years ago, a campaign began to differentiate them from us. The first known Neanderthal skeletal remains, which gave them their name, were discovered in the Neander Valley, Germany, in 1856. For nearly 150 years, Neanderthals were differentiated from Homo sapiens in every way possible. However, in the past 20 years, the amount of knowledge we have acquired about them, both through fossil and archaeological discoveries and through the sequencing of their DNA, has allowed experts to understand what their daily lives were really like. Neanderthals were skilled hunters and gatherers of a wide variety of foods. They controlled f...

Thanks to the tooth of a hunter-gatherer who lived 23,000 years ago in Granada, Spain, it has been shown that the Iberian Peninsula was the last refuge of the first settlers of Europe during the coldest period of the Last Ice Age. The first Homo sapiens settlers of Europe arrived in an initial wave about 45,000 years ago, already well into the Last Ice Age. For about 15,000 years they were colonizing the continent, without too many problems. But between 25,000 and 19,000 years ago, all that was left of them was a small enclave in the south of the Iberian Peninsula. Already the bones, and the technological styles of stone tools, seemed to indicate to experts that all of southern Europe had functioned as a refuge during the so-called Glacial Maximum, the coldest and harshest period of the last Ice Age. But new discoveries point in the other direction. In particular, the analysis of the genes of an individual discovered in the Cueva del Malalmuerzo, in the Granada area of Spain. This huma...