Where have all the Neanderthals gone?
Held at New York University, "Neanderthals Revisited: New Approaches and Perspectives" asked researchers to tackle the place of Neanderthals -- the heavy-browed and muscular early humans often stereotyped as "cavemen" -- in human history.
Neanderthals lived mostly in Europe and the Middle East from at least 28,000 to 200,000 years ago, before disappearing mysteriously from the fossil record just as modern-looking humans moved into those regions.
Whether people today owe any ancestry to these earlier folks has roiled paleoanthropology for decades.
The debate is central to disagreement over the "Out of Africa" model for human development. Largely based on fossils and modern genes, that model suggests that modern-looking people, "Homo sapiens," appeared in east Africa as early as 150,000 years ago and moved outward before 80,000 years ago.
A less popular theory, the "multi-regional" model, holds that humanity springs from a combination of early modern people from Africa and older human species, such as Neanderthals.
For two days at the meeting, the scholars looked at new ways of analyzing old bones, discussing CAT scans of Neanderthal fossil skulls, mechanical differences between humans and genetic data.
Among the findings:
? Researchers from the Genome Quebec Innovation Center conclude Neanderthals could have contributed 0.1 percent of their genes to modern humans, and possibly none.
? Neanderthals were "very good" homebody hunters, sticking close to one region to find bison, deer and other prey. Early modern humans ranged far and wide on their hunts, in contrast, reported University of New Mexico researchers.
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Where have all the Neanderthals gone?
