Niches

Research into Pleistocene Man continues.

In this article, we (still) have the last Neanders contributing to a "40,000 year old" European. That would be a man from Peştera cu Oase, who (last this article has heard, in 2015) lived 40-35kBC. That era is considered "Proto-Aurignacian" (or Cro Magnon perhaps); most would site Aurignacian proper after 35kBC. In the middle of the span is the Campanian volcano, which likely nuked the Neanders for good (Gibraltar aside). I'll propose here that the man's Neander grandparent was a survivor of the Italian blast and surrendered to the tribe. Although this one's successors didn't survive the Gravettian interlude [UPDATE 5/5/22 also here] as other Aurignacians would.

The article doesn't touch the Neander brain much. It does see the Neanders as prone to addiction and depression; other articles have it that the Neander brain-type got selected against. Those anti-mutations perhaps left the other mutations stranded, which remnants have expressed themselves as depressive / addictive; although the latter didn't die off. I presume that the new hybrid tribes found a use for the village Eeyore. The archaic genes also affect "chronotype" - by which, they mean Neander Man was a night person.

What does seem clear is that the Neander-Tal type was pale and sunburn-prone. The Cro-Denis type (they are absolutely talking the Denisova Cave, not the para-Denis peoples in Australasia) tended more to cold-resistance and altitude-resistance. Neander, I take it, was a wood-wose (he could swim too); Denisovans lived under the open sky high on the plateaux, or at least crossing mountain-passes a lot.

Each of these gene-packages, I will note, select for life in VERY marginal environments. No riverside savanna for them! These peoples, then, were able to hide away from postAfrican humans who did, in fact, settle the lowlands. And so it went 60kBC-37kBC. But modern-man didn't consistently settle Eurasia before all that; moreover, these genetics predate the great postAfrican arrival. So what were Neanders and Denisovans, hiding from before that?

I'll guess that the megafauna of Eurasia owned the lowlands, and forced the one into the forest and the other to the mountain-passes. African man was better-suited to fight off the tigers and bears.

UPDATE 9/22: Tools from Burma. Did paraDenisova own the Asian lowlands?