With whom our ancestors fought and slept

Hello! We hope you miss you. We invited Alexander Sokolov, the chief editor of the portal Antropogenesis.ru, to our studio and asked him to tell about our ancestors. Video and its decoding - under the cut.



Did the Cro-Magnons fight Neanderthals, or marry them?
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An interesting topic that appears in any films, probably about Neanderthals, is the relationship between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. And of course, the most entertaining option is a battle, it is a war. And we see in the films, and in the old and new ones, and in the BBC film “Planet of the Apered Men” recently released in 2011, this film is so originally called - we see there that Cro-Magnons, and they are played by ordinary negros, stumble upon woods on Neanderthals. Neanderthals immediately, seeing them, begin to chase them with spears, shout, but in the end Cro-Magnon people endure all these Neanderthals, sneak in them be healthy. And in other films we see a genocide on the part of the Cro-Magnon in respect of the poor unfortunate good Neanderthals who are exterminated. Another option is a cultural exchange, but, as a rule, they show that naive and backward Neanderthals are trying to learn something from the Cro-Magnons. We see in the “Fight for Fire” just such a collision. Cro-Magnons there do not want to exterminate Neanderthals, they look at them as funny animals. And of course, love, inter-specific sex. This is also the central stage of many films, as a rule it is a beautiful croonion, courageous, such an uncouth macho neanderthal, and sex between them in the rain, in the mud is a spectacular scene that adorns for example the mentioned movie “The Last Neanderthal”, and others too, there sure to show it.

No evidence

Actually, we strictly speaking do not know anything about who destroyed and eaten whom. We have no evidence of armed, any aggressive clashes between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals in Europe.
I remind you just in case: Neanderthals lived in Europe for hundreds of thousands of years, and about 50 thousand years ago our ancestors, Cro-Magnons, came to Europe from Africa. It takes some time, several thousand years, and the Neanderthals in Europe disappear. Everything. That's all we know.

And what happened there - science is unknown. And there are various hypotheses, including exotic ones. A few years ago, by the way, our Russian archeologists actively developed the hypothesis that, perhaps, Neanderthals did not meet with Cro-Magnons at all. There are sometimes very inaccurate dating. And archaeologists have suggested the hypothesis that about 40 thousand years ago a cataclysm occurred in Europe. Powerful volcanic eruptions in the Caucasus, in Italy. A volcanic winter has arrived. Large animals became extinct, Neanderthals became extinct. And after that the Cro-Magnon came to Europe, which was already empty, and they did not meet with Neanderthals at all. Well, this hypothesis, I repeat, is exotic, and many archaeologists and anthropologists look at it with skepticism. Apparently, there were still meetings, but what character did they have? Once we tried the same Krapina, which I mentioned, to pass off as a battlefield. That is, there are many bones found in ancient man. These bones are fragmented, it seems even burned. And this was issued as clear evidence of cannibalism, and who ate whom? Well, of course, the Cro-Magnon men ate Neanderthals after the battle to capture the cave. But now it has long been understood that there has been dating more than 100 thousand years, that there were no Cro-Magnonites in Europe at this time. That is, if there was a massacre there, which, strictly speaking, it is necessary to prove, then it was the Neanderthals who ate their own, which we see in general and in other cases.

About cave love

But as far as sex is concerned, here in the past few years paleogenetics, that is, the ability to explore the DNA of ancient people, compared with modern ones, has given us convincing evidence that at least sometimes these clashes between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons were not hostile. Of course, we don’t know how they met there for love or not for love, but apparently they had some marriages, one might say, and 2.5% of the Neanderthal genes went to modern non-Africans, including you, you are not African, not African. And paleogenetics are now actively exploring this contribution of Neanderthals - what it gave us, what are the benefits associated with the immune system, with the metabolism. Even recently there was a study that analyzed the genomes of many modern people and showed that at least there were 3 such events, that is, Neanderthals first interbred with the ancestors of all non-Africans, apparently shortly after leaving Africa, then they interbred with the ancestors of only Europeans and Asians, and the third time only with the ancestors of the Asians. That was such a long process, they study how it happened. More recently, it was shown that, for example, it is likely that if a Neanderthal was married to the Cro-Magnon, and she could have a boy, then she had a high probability of miscarriage. That is, probably, their boys were born rarely, girls were born more often.

Ancient violence in the movies and in reality

We have already started the topic of violence, because what a movie without violence, without spectacular fights, throwing copies at each other, and of course any movie about ancient people is accompanied by such scenes. The same film “The Fight for Fire” - there we see terrible cannibals who chop off the hand of poor Cro-Magnon, and some kind of intraspecific clashes with bloodshed. The main problem here is that if we find some very ancient skeleton, then in most cases it is almost impossible to establish the cause of death. Well, imagine: we found a skull, and in it a hole. Then the question arises: what is this hole. Let's say that if it is not lethal, there are signs of healing - it means that this was not the cause of death. If there are no signs of healing, the question arises: the first is a blow with a tool, some kind of stabbing. The second - an accident, fell. The third is a predator attack. Fourth, the skull was damaged after death, that is, after this skeleton was already lying in the ground, it decomposed, and something fell on it or crushed it with a rock, and then it cracked. The fourth option is generally the crooked hands of an archaeologist who dug up this skeleton and damaged it with a shovel. It is very difficult to establish which of these cases is before us. Of course, traces of violence on ancient bones are found, but often these are controversial traces and, even more so, when we try to establish the cause of death.

Prehistoric Detective

But in some cases it is still possible. One such remarkable case is the cave of Sima de los Usesos in Spain. There is actually such a well, just a dump of bones, where apparently the corpses were dumped. It is considered the oldest sanitary burial. This is a Heidelberg man, these people themselves lived somewhere on the sidelines, and they threw their dead people there. There are many of them, there are only a few dozen skulls found there. They are actively studied, even DNA extracted. And just recently, about a year ago, one of these skulls was examined and found that there are two neat and, what is more important, identical holes on his left forehead. And the fact that they are the same, that there are two of them, makes it possible to almost completely eliminate an accident. That is, as in a joke: fell on a knife 5 times. There is no such thing. And they are located in such a way - any forensic scientist will say that when they hit his forehead with his right hand, such holes are obtained. That is, he was hit twice with a stone, or with some kind of hard object on the head. The first blow was fatal, but just in case, they were shot a second time, and only then a dead, or dead, because we do not even know the floor, strictly speaking, we dropped it into this shaft, into the well. True, there are no traces of cannibalism, that is, they have not eaten it, but apparently there were some other reasons. The question arises: how was this whole dump formed, what happened to these people? This is considered the oldest strictly proven murder case. Note that anthropologists, in this case, paleopathologists, work in much the same way as modern criminologists. The difference is in the statute of limitations, that is, these murders, crimes took place a very long time, there is no one to judge, and we can hardly find relatives, although descendants may be living.