SCIENTISTS: NEANDERTHALS WERE AMERICAN ANCESTORS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 9, 1992                   TAG: 9202090085
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: CHICAGO                                LENGTH: Medium
SCIENTISTS: NEANDERTHALS WERE AMERICAN ANCESTORS
The Neanderthal people - a brawny, brutish race that populated Europe and the Middle East until about 35,000 years ago - are the ancestors of modern-day Europeans and Americans and are not the evolutionary dead-end that most anthropologists have thought them to be, researchers said Saturday.
New evidence reported at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science shows strong biological links between the Neanderthals and modern Europeans.
Other evidence indicates that the Neanderthals had cultural and behavioral characteristics virtually identical to those of the early modern humans who lived in the region at the same time.
"If they were living the same way and doing the same things [as early humans], then they were the same people," said paleontologist Milford H. Wolpoff of the University of Michigan.
What Wolpoff termed "recent and very startling discoveries" fly in the face of genetic evidence that indicated that all modern peoples are descended from a single female who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago - the so-called "African Eve" or "Mother of Us All" - and seem likely to stir new controversy over what is already a hotly debated subject.
The controversy was brought into sharp focus in the 1980s when molecular biologists, particularly the late Alan Wilson of the University of California, Berkeley, developed highly controversial genetic evidence that established the concept of the African Eve. Those studies seemingly left no place for Neanderthals in human evolution.
But the genetic studies changed the nature of the debate by introducing a hypothesis that could be tested. If the African Eve theory is correct, then almost no intermingling of Neanderthals and early modern humans could have occurred.
If Neanderthal traits are found in modern humans, Wolpoff said, then the African Eve theory is refuted. "That is the case," he said.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB