Ancient Mandible Reveals the Complexity of the Neanderthals’ Origin

A team of scientists from the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), led by José María Bermúdez de Castro, together with the French researcher Amélie Vialet, from the Natural History Museum in Paris, has just published a paper in the journal PLOS ONE on the Middle Pleistocene Montmaurin-La Niche mandible, which reveals the complexity of the origin of the Neanderthals.

This mandible was found by Raoul Cammas on 18 June 1949 in the karstic cavities of Montmaurin within the La Niche cave (France), where stone tools and fossil remains of different species of canids, equids and ursids also appeared, helping to place it in time.

The presumed age of this mandible, between 200,000 and 240,000 years, had led a close morphological similarity to the mandible of European Neanderthals to be presumed, particularly in the teeth, but the mathematical techniques applied to the study of a wide variety of mandibles, including those of a group of recent African ones, show that it is more in line with the most archaic specimens from Europe, including those from Dmanisi.Researchers from the CENIEH have published a paper in the journal PLOS ONE which carries out a review of this human fossil found in 1949 in southern France, whose characteristics support the mosaic evolution hypothesis for the Neanderthal lineage

Credit: CENIEH