Neanderthal Origins: Three Candidates, No Answers
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- A radical hypothesis outlined in the piece posits that Neanderthals descended from modern humans through interbreeding hundreds of thousands of years ago — the author repeatedly emphasizes this is 'only a suggestion' that would require the biggest rewrite of the human family tree to date
- Three candidate species have been proposed as Neanderthal ancestors: Homo erectus (possible but unconfirmed in Europe), Homo antecessor (Gran Dolina cave, Spain, dated 772,000–949,000 years ago, with proteins linking it to the unknown Ancestor X), and Homo heidelbergensis (now considered less plausible because most of its original fossils have been reassigned to other species)
- The oldest known Neanderthal fossils are roughly 430,000 years old from Sima de los Huesos in northern Spain, and 2016 DNA sequencing confirmed them as Neanderthal-like rather than a separate precursor species
- Neanderthals went extinct around 40,000 years ago, with the last reliably dated populations in southern Europe — mostly in modern Spain — after a cold climatic episode forced them into a refuge in southern France and wiped out much of their genetic diversity
- Genetics places the split between modern human ancestors and the Neandersovans (the common ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans) at 500,000–700,000 years ago, pointing to an Ancestor X population somewhere in a wide arc from the eastern Mediterranean to the Caucasus and western Asia
- Recent fossil finds complicate the picture: a skull from Yunxian, China, dated 940,000–1.1 million years old, appears to be an early Denisovan, and ~773,000-year-old remains from Grotte à Hominidés in Morocco have features consistent with Ancestor X
Why it matters: Even with extensive Neanderthal fossils and DNA, researchers cannot identify their ancestors — and because no DNA has been preserved from H. erectus, H. antecessor, or H. heidelbergensis, the next major hominin fossil discovery could overturn the current human family tree and reshape how we see our own species' evolutionary role.
