"The Neanderthals did not become extinct"
busy·@wayneb·
0.000 HBD"The Neanderthals did not become extinct"
- The archaeologist Joao Zilhao defends that the ancient inhabitants of Europe are our ancestors  It was the outrage that led Joao Zilhao to become ambassador of the Neanderthals. Remember the scene as if it were yesterday. It was in May of 1996. The magazine Nature presented the discovery in France of Neanderthal fossils from 34,000 years ago along with technologically advanced stone tools - of the Chatelperronian type. It was a sensational find. But the authors of the investigation concluded that the Neandertals could not have invented those tools. They were not intelligent enough, they should have copied them from Homo sapiens. Zilhao, who was working at the University of Lisbon at the time, felt outraged. He had been discovering fossils and tools of Neanderthals in the Grotto of Oliveira for years and could not see why they would not be able to invent Chatelperronian technology tools. From that day on, he set out to dismantle the prejudice that Neandertals could not be as intelligent as Homo sapiens.  In these 22 years he has worked at the universities of Lisbon in Portugal, Bristol in the United Kingdom and Barcelona, where he arrived in 2010 with an Icrea contract. He has excavated in Spain, Portugal and Romania and has studied archaeological collections from France, Italy and Croatia. He has published dozens of researches confirming, again and again, that Neanderthals had cognitive abilities equivalent to those of Homo sapiens. The results presented this week, which show that they made rock paintings and put on collars, "should close the debate on whether the Neanderthals had symbolic thought," he says. But, if they were as intelligent as the Homo sapiens, why did they become extinct? "They did not go extinct, they are our ancestors!" He rejects. Between 1% and 4% of the genome of current Europeans is of Neanderthal origin, while the remaining 96% to 99% comes from Homo sapiens from Africa. "Less than 4% does not look like much, but it's expected when you mix a large and a small population. There must have been about 20,000 Neanderthals throughout Europe and a million or two Africans came. That's why Neanderthal DNA is so diluted among current Europeans. " For Zilhao, the Neanderthals are Homo sapiens, not a different species. He is aware that this vision is not shared by most of his colleagues. But "I always say what I think. I try to get along with everyone, but if someone does not like what I say, I'm sorry. In science it is important to rely on the data and, from there, that everyone can freely express what they think. For me, the data does not indicate that Neandertals and Homo sapiens are different species. " It has taken him twenty long years to get the scientific community to recognize the symbolic capacity of the Neandertals. Your next challenge is to convince your colleagues that the Neanderthals have not been extinguished, that they survive in each one of us.