Question about neanderthals

Question

Why did the discovery of Neanderthals create such a problem for anthropologists? They are called "the ancestors that nobody wanted" for what reason?

any link to an article that can answer that question would be nice, thanks.

Answer 1

in reality we are closer kin to the chimp than to Neanderthals,we both evolved from a common ancestor but went in different directions ,i imagine we ate the poor brutes ,they must have been delicious cause their all gone...tom

Answer 2

Neanderthal (pronounced "Neander-tal"), actually did not create problems for paleoanthropologists when the first specimen was found.  The other answerer is correct in one aspect, that the first Neanderthal specimen found was a squat, stout, large brained creature that represented "the missing link", and fit in quite nicely with Darwinian evolution by natural selection.  

However, the first Neanderthal specimen was not assembled incorrectly.

Actually, he was an aged individual who displayed many aspects of deformity as evidenced in his skeleton, due to rickets and arthritis.  He was an old man, and basically partially crippled.  The anthropologist who examined the specimen, from Chapelle aux Saints, Professor Boule, was rather biased in his view and thus " He described the La Chapelle-aux-Saints man, and subsequently all Neandertals, as dull-witted, brutish, ape-like creatures who walked hunched over with a shuffling gait.  Unfortunately, this mistaken view was universally accepted by paleoanthropologists for decades." (http://anthro.palomar.edu/homo2/mod_homo...

Neanderthals have always been problemmatic in terms of where to place them in our family tree.  Some anthropologists placed them in a direct, ancestral line to Europeans.  They have been placed in a back and forth way, but regardless, Neanderthals are our closest relative, even if they may not be ancestral to us.

The fossil record is scarce, but, as an archeologist, I must say that it is very intriguing to me that the Neanderthals and the "Cro-magnons", who had radically different skeletal morphologies and lived in Europe at the same time, some 35,000 years ago, shared the same stone too technology, called "Mousterian".  The two had contact, and may have interbred.

Perhaps our modern ancestors outcompeted Neanderthals for resources, or did they go on a genocidal campaign against them?  

We may never know the answers, but this much is true.  Neanderthals in Europe were cold adapted, very successful, large brained, cultured people who buried their dead, had a ritual life, as evidenced by their burials, and they even enjoyed music.  They hunted sucessfully, and survived some of the most brutal ice ages which could have driven our ancestors to extinction.

We shared a common ancestor with Neanderthals, and from the molecular/genetic evidence, we diverged about 250,000 to 300,000 years ago.

But, I'd like to think they played a very small part, genetically, in our ancestry.  

Future discoveries and techniques, both in paleoanthropology, archeology, and in genetics, will give us better answers.

From

James Zaworski

Answer 3

The first Neanderthal skeleton was assembled incorrectly. The resulting "caveman" was squat, bow legged, hunched over and really not attractive. People didn't like the image.

When Cro-magon (named for the French village where the remains were fround and now know as Early Modern Humans "EMH") the Neanderthal image plunged even more.

Over time the fortunes of the Neanderthals have risen and fallen. They were rehabilited as a plucky kind that survived the ice age. Then dropped when the DNA showed they weren't in our lineage.

Answer 4

I have studied anthropology and archeology for 40 years and I don't have a problem with it.