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Atapuerca researchers Aida Gómez and María Martinón have declared to Spanish newspaper Público that the material evidence from fossils clearly tell of a divergence time of c. 1 Ma., what strongly contradicts the short chronology proposed in a section of Green 2010 (but itself contradicted in the paper by another estimate of 850 Ka, more realistic).
Martinón says that the [proto-]Neanderthals who lived some 600,000 years at Atapuerca were already a different species from Homo sapiens. This makes impossible that their last common ancestor lived only 300,000 years ago, as the Neanderthal Genome project proposes. The teeth of other homins from the Gran Dolina of Atapuerca, from 900,000 years ago, already presented traits making them more Neanderthal than Sapiens, adds Gómez.
Source: Público.
Reference research: Aida Gómez Robles et al., Geometric morphometric analysis of the crown morphology of the lower first premolar of hominins, with special attention to Pleistocene Homo. Journal of Human Evolution 2008. Pay per view.
2 comments:
"the [proto-]Neanderthals who lived some 600,000 years at Atapuerca were already a different species from Homo sapiens. This makes impossible that their last common ancestor lived only 300,000 years ago"
Not necessarily so because, presumably, Homo spaiens did not even then exist. So the contemporary species that gave rise to Homo spiens may have been as different from today's Homo sapiens as were the Atapuerca proto-Neanderthals.
It's just a regular press article. I had to add the '[proto-]' prefix to make the sentence make sense because the journalist talked happily about "Neanderthals" some 600 Ka ago, what is clearly wrong.
What Gómez and Martinón are saying is that the individuals found in Europe, specifically at Atapuerca (which range from H. antecessor to H. neaderthalensis passing through H. heidelbergensis through a chronology of almost a million years) are clearly divergent in anatomy from the putative H. ergaster -> H. rhodesiensis -> H. sapiens line that is found in Africa.
This is not really new, I get the same impression once and again when reading stuff on European prehistory prior to the Upper Paleolithic, and specially when Atapuerca is considered. This site has been extremely revealing regarding Neanderthal evolution but sheds no light on the evolution of H. sapiens as such.
I am in principle in agreement with these conclusions because all the evidence suggests a parallel but distinct evolution of both human species in this long period. There's just no real evidence against this interpretation.
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