Neanderthal

Neanderthals May Have Hung On Longer Than Thought [Excerpts]
 
Neanderthals might have held out in isolated refuges for thousands of years longer than previously thought, a team of scientists reported in the Web site of the journal "Nature" on Wednesday.
 
The Neanderthals' survival at what may have been their last refuge at Gibraltar, at the southern tip of Spain, for far longer than currently assumed suggests our ancestors may not have driven them to extinction.
 
"While the rest of where they lived was getting colder, down here at the southernmost tip of Europe there were still little pockets of Mediterranean climate, so the world of the Neanderthals there didn't change that much," researcher Clive Finlayson, an evolutionary biologist at The Gibraltar Museum and lead author of the Nature article, told LiveScience.
 
An expanded window of time in which modern humans and Neanderthals might have interacted reopens possibilities they may have interbred, experts added.
 
If Neanderthals lasted longer than once thought, the question of whether Neanderthals and modern humans interbred is raised again, said paleoanthropologist Eric Delson at the American Museum of Natural History and at Lehman College in New York.
 
Past digs in the area had uncovered what some researchers claimed was the skeleton of a hybrid child.
 
"How could there be a hybrid, if the last Neanderthal died out thousands of years before this child was born? But if it can be shown that Neanderthals were still living near Gibraltar some 24,000 years ago, that part of the hesitancy disappears," Delson said.
 
(Choi, Live Science, Foxnews.com, 9/14/06)