Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began is a book by the British science writer Colin Tudge.

# REDIRECT Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers

* Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers.

In 2006, two anthropologists of the University of Arizona proposed a new explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals.

They could have co-existed in Europe for as long as 10, 000 years, during which human populations exploded vastly outnumbering Neanderthals, possibly outcompeting them by sheer numerical strength.

Modern humans are known to have overlapped with Neanderthals in Europe for more than 10, 000 years, and the discovery raises the possibility that Neanderthals, modern humans and the Denisova hominin may have co-existed.

" Evidence at the cave shows the Neanderthals likely used it as a shelter " for 100, 000 years.

However, modern Homo sapiens have a brain volume slightly smaller ( 1250 cm < sup > 3 </ sup >) than Neanderthals, women have a brain slightly smaller than men and the Flores hominids ( Homo floresiensis ), nicknamed hobbits, had a cranial capacity of about 380 cm < sup > 3 </ sup > ( considered small for a chimpanzee ), about a third of the Homo erectus average.

The history of Kazakhstan describes the human past in the Eurasia's largest segment of the steppe belt that was the home and crossroads for numerous human groups starting with extinct Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus 1 mln – 800, 000 in the Karatau Mountains, Caspian and Balkhash areas ; Neanderthals 140 – 40 thousand years ago in the Karatau Mountains and Central Kazakhstan, and the arrival of the modern Homo Sapiens 40 – 12 thousand years ago in the Southern, Central, and Eastern Kazakhstan.

Mines of a similar age in Hungary are believed to be sites where Neanderthals may have mined flint for weapons and tools.

People during the Middle Paleolithic, such as the Neanderthals and Middle Paleolithic Homo sapiens in Africa, began to catch shellfish for food as revealed by shellfish cooking in Neanderthal sites in Italy about 110, 000 years ago and Middle Paleolithic Homo sapiens sites at Pinnacle Point, in Africa around 164, 000 BP.

The dating for ' Eve ' was a blow to the multiregional hypothesis, and a boost to the hypothesis that modern humans originated relatively recently in Africa and spread from there, replacing more " archaic " human populations such as Neanderthals.

In principle, earlier Eves can also be defined going beyond the species, for example one who is ancestral to both modern humanity and Neanderthals, or, further back, an " Eve " ancestral to all members of genus Homo and chimpanzees in genus Pan.

Some populations of archaic Homo were significantly larger than recent Homo sapiens ; for example, Homo heidelbergensis in southern Africa may have commonly reached in height, while Neanderthals were about 30 % more massive.

It was apparently used by Neanderthals for a ceremony ; bear bones scattered on the floor further suggests this was likely to have had some sort of ritual purpose.

The valley of the Danube was abounding with game, and many caves in the slopes of the crater provided shelter for Neanderthals and their successors.

In the Levant for example, assemblages produced by Neanderthals are indistinguishable from those produced by Qafzeh type modern humans.

Author Jared Diamond argues in his 1991 non-fiction book, The Third Chimpanzee, that Châtelperron may represent a community of Neanderthals who had to some extent adopted the culture of the modern Homo sapiens that had established themselves in the surrounding area, which would account for the signs of a hybrid culture found at the site.

Excavation for the period has never been very comprehensive however, and if the Sarajevo area was indeed inhabited during the Paleolithic era, the residents were probably Neanderthals.

New research led by Liubov Vitalievna Golovanova and Vladimir Borisovich Doronichev of the ANO Laboratory of Prehistory in St. Petersburg, Russia, supports the hypothesis that these eruptions drove Neanderthals to extinction and cleared the way for modern humans to thrive in Europe and Asia.

Neanderthals survived this abrupt change in the environment, so it's possible for other human groups too.

Transported to yet another world, he is rescued from a frozen river by a group of Neanderthals, and a voice comes from the harp, telling him that friends will search for him on the river.

Cut marks on Neanderthal bones from various sites such as Combe-Grenal and Abri Moula in France may imply that the Neanderthals, like some contemporary human cultures, may have practiced ritual defleshing for ( presumably ) religious reasons.

For instance the Middle Stone Age inhabitants of the region now occupied by the Democratic Republic of the Congo hunted large long catfish with specialized barbed fishing points as early as 90, 000 years ago, and Neanderthals and Middle Paleolithic Homo sapiens in Africa began to catch shellfish for food as revealed by shellfish cooking in Neanderthal sites in Italy about 110, 000 years ago and Middle Paleolithic Homo sapiens sites at Pinnacle Point, in Africa.

Recent archaeological research shows that Neanderthals had the capability and tools for face painting ; although they are no longer considered a direct ancestor of homo sapiens, they lived alongside them in some areas and it is a reasonable assumption that humanity has painted faces and bodies since the very beginning.

It may have given humans an important advantage over Neanderthals who likely did not have a similar division of labor and who had similarly robust skeletons for both sexes.

Neanderthals and modern humans coexisted in Europe for several thousand years, but the duration of this period is uncertain.

Myra Shackley and Bernard Heuvelmans have speculated that the Almases are a relict population of Neanderthals, while Loren Coleman suggests surviving specimens of Homo erectus.

The new technology generated a population explosion of modern humans which is believed to have led to the extinction of the Neanderthals.

An alternative to extinction is that Neanderthals were absorbed into the Cro-Magnon population by interbreeding.

The latter result would not be unexpected if contact occurred between a small colonizing population of modern humans and a much larger resident population of Neanderthals.

While interbreeding is viewed as the most parsimonious interpretation of the genetic discoveries, the authors point out they cannot conclusively rule out an alternative scenario, in which the source population of non-African modern humans was already more closely related to Neanderthals than other Africans were, due to ancient genetic divisions within Africa.

Fossils of Neanderthals dating to the middle Palaeolithic period have been unearthed in northern Croatia, with the most famous and the best presented site in Krapina.

Neanderthals are believed to have practiced cannibalism, and Neanderthals may have been eaten by anatomically modern humans.

Mutations of the corresponding gene in mice ( FOXP2 is fairly well conserved ; modern humans share the same allele as Neanderthals ) cause reductions in size and vocalization rate.

Recent DNA evidence suggests that several haplotypes of Neanderthal origin are present among all non-African populations, and Neanderthals and other hominids, such as Denisova hominin may have contributed up to 6 % of their genome to present-day humans.

The pattern of encephalization started with Homo habilis which at approximately 600 cc had a brain slightly larger than chimpanzees, and continued with Homo erectus ( 800-1100 cc ), and reached a maximum in Neanderthals with an average size of ( 1200-1900cc ), larger even than Homo sapiens.

After recovery from a genetic bottleneck that might be due to the Toba supervolcano catastrophe, a fairly small group left Africa and briefly interbred with Neanderthals, probably in the middle-east or even North Africa before their departure.

Genetic evidence has also been employed to resolve the question of whether there was any gene flow between early modern humans and Neanderthals, and to arrive enhance our understanding of the early human migration patterns and splitting dates.

While the divergence point of the mtDNA was unexpectedly deep in time, the full genomic sequence suggested the Denisovans belonged to the same lineage as Neanderthals, with the two diverging shortly after their line split from that giving rise to modern humans.

Scientists have also suggested that the discovery of the flute may help to explain " the probable behavioural and cognitive gulf between " Neanderthals and early modern human.

This has been interpreted as suggesting that Neanderthals believed in an afterlife, although the evidence is not unequivocal – while the dead were apparently indeed buried deliberately, the flowers might have been introduced by burrowing rodents.

Evidence of hominid inhabitation of the Rock dates back to the Neanderthals.

Mousterian deposits found at Gorham's Cave, which are associated with Neanderthals in Europe, have been dated to as recently as 28, 000 to 24, 000 BP, leading to suggestions that Gibraltar was one of the last places of Neanderthal habitation.

Clive Finlayson, evolutionary biologist at the Gibraltar Museum said " this natural richness of wildlife and plants in the nearby sandy plains, woodlands, shrublands, wetlands, cliffs and coastline probably helped the Neanderthals to persist.

The Great Auk is known to have been preyed upon by Neanderthals more than 100, 000 years ago, as evidenced by well-cleaned bones found by their campfires.

Homo erectus and Neanderthals migrated from Africa to Europe before the emergence of modern humans.

Neanderthals are known to have lived in the Levant.

There are also several well-preserved burials of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens and passage from nomadic hunter-gatherer groups to complex, sedentary agricultural societies is extensively documented at the site.

A site in Ukraine suggests Neanderthals built dwellings using mammoth bones.