Neandertals, humans may have grown apart
By Bruce Bower
A fierce debate revolves around whether Neandertals, who lived in Europe and the Middle East from around 130,000 to 28,000 years ago, belonged to the human species or a separate one.
A new technique for probing fossil anatomy has generated support for the designation of Neandertals as a separate species, according to a report in the Aug. 2 Nature. Fossil analyses indicate that from infancy to adulthood, the Neandertal skull exhibited a markedly different trajectory of shape changes from that observed in modern humans, say anthropologists Marcia S. Ponce de León and Christoph P.E. Zollikofer of the University of Zurich, Switzerland.