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Definition
Archaic Homo found in Eurasia between 400,000 and 40,000 years ago.
Introduction
Although Neanderthal fossils were first recovered in Belgium in 1830 and in Gibraltar in 1848, it was not until 1856 when skeletal remains found by miners in the Feldhofer Cave in the Neander Valley, Germany, that scientists entertained the idea that the bones might belong to an extinct form of an ancient human (Shreeve 1995). In 1864, the bones were assigned to the species Homo neanderthalensis(Neander Valley Man). This was the first recognition of an extinct human relative. At that time, the prevailing view considered Neanderthals as an extinct kind of human that played no role in the ancestry to modern humans. In the 1930s several scholars challenged this interpretation and entertained the view that Neanderthals were progenitors to modern humans. Today Neanderthals are seen as an evolutionary lineage close to modern humans that exchanged some genes with us but died...
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References
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Johanson, D. (2017). Homo neanderthalensis . In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3438-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3438-1
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