Marcellin Boule Who First Identified the Neanderthals

¶ … Marcellin Boule who first identified the Neanderthals as the "missing link," a "primitive evolutionary link to modern man"

In many ways, there are clues that this may have been true. First of all, the Neanderthal is one of the first hominids to have an upright stature as close to ours as it may be. Second of all, despite an obviously less qualified brain, the Neanderthal had the ability to create and use tools, practiced hunting with spears and other types of simple weapons and is believed to have had a certain hierarchical society. Several archeologists believed the Neanderthal had a primitive burial ritual as well.

Most important of all, in my opinion, is the fact that the Neanderthals are deemed to have had the ability of speech. According to some scientists, language has been around for 400,000 years, which means that the entire period during which the Neanderthal lives is hereby covered

. A hominid that had the ability to communicate with his fellow people can be linked to Homo sapiens and, later on, to modern man himself.

Several archaeological findings enforce the theory that the Neanderthal was a regional variant of modern man. A child discovered in Portugal, dating from the period in which the two species are believed to have lived together, has resemblances from both species. Even more so, tools from the two species which are virtually identical were also discovered. We will not however base this argumentation on more or less doubtful objects, such as a bone flute discovered and believed to have belonged to the Neanderthal culture.

On the other hand, it is difficult to ignore the anatomic differences that exist between modern Homo sapiens and Neanderthal, due to the new fossil discoveries and computer analysis. For example, the skull of early humans and that of Neanderthals is fundamentally different, as researchers have shown. The cranial capacity in the Neanderthal is larger than that of modern man, ranging up to 1450 cubic centimeters, while the cranial bones formation is also different (a large occipital bulge in the back present in the Neanderthal, for example

The DNA testing should also provide additional information to reject the theory according to which the Neanderthals are merely a regional variant of modern man. Indeed, latest research in this area has come to show that the two different types of hominids belonged to different species rather than being branches of the same one. Without going to much in the field of genetic research, we need to point out that the difference between a sequence of Neanderthal DNA and that of modern human was up to 36 positions, while that between two humans is at most 22. This comes to support the theory according to which they belong to different species

According to New York University paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati, the evidence discovered and the comparisons between skeletons shows that "Neanderthals represent an extinct human species and therefore refute the regional continuity model for Europe"

Much of our discussion also revolves around the issue whether or not the two species have interbred. This issue is closely related to the extinction of Neanderthals. According to some scientists, the extinction of Neanderthals was a sudden phenomenon: they were quickly replaced by Homo sapiens in all areas they had populated. On the other hand, several other scientists believe the replacement of Neanderthals was a process that took several thousands of years. We are faced with two different evolutionary models to be described.

The multi-regional model asserts that there was a global evolution "modern H. sapiens because a sufficient level of interbreeding throughout the dispersed population was maintained over this long time period"

. This would obviously mean that replacement was gradual and it bases its theory on the fossil evidence showing that in several geographical areas, the hominid populations were stable over an interval of several thousands of years.