National Geographic currently has a feature on Neanderthals, a human species that flourished from 175,000 – 27,000 years before present in mostly Europe and to some extent the Middle East. The feature centers on a fossil reconstruction of a Neanderthal woman. Many bony parts, including the skull, come from those of an actual Neanderthal female, and feminized versions of bone remains of a Neanderthal male were used to complete the skeleton. Muscles were added in accordance with the markings on the bones indicating points of attachment of muscles and the size of muscles. The pigmentation is the best guess of the reconstruction team. Genetic analyses have revealed that some Neanderthals had pale skin and red hair.
The face of the Neanderthal woman doesn’t look feminine (Fig 1) when she is contrasted with modern European women.
Fig 1. Pictures of the reconstruction of a Neanderthal female by Adrie and Alfons Kennis (the brothers are shown; see details in National Geographic). She had a face larger than that of modern human males. The Neanderthals were shorter than modern Europeans.
Fig 2 shows two examples of male Neanderthals reconstructed from fossils by a different team, showing that the Neanderthal woman is indeed feminine compared to Neanderthal men.
Fig 2. Two reconstructions of male Neanderthals by G. J. Sawyer and Viktor Deak. Taken from The Last Human: A Guide to Twenty-Two Species of Extinct Humans; this book has lots of excellent fossil reconstructions that are worth a look.
Just as there is tremendous diversity among modern humans, Neanderthals had diverse looks also. Hence, there is a problem with forming a mental picture of how Neanderthals looked in general from a single fossil reconstruction, but one is limited by good fossil specimens and the availability of a team that is willing to undertake the painstaking task of reconstructing from bony remains how a flesh-and-blood version of the person would have looked like. Nevertheless, some average differences can be noted.
One difference between the Neanderthals and humans of today involves the amount of bone deposited in the face. The Neanderthals were much more robustly built. In comparison with the Neanderthal woman, the modern human female shown below (Fig 3) looks feminine and clearly female even though she is somewhat masculinized among women of her ethnic background. So we are looking at a drastic contrast showing how finer facial features can make faces look more feminine even though they are not feminine (among females) or more feminine.
Fig 3. Non-feminine human female (from Met Art), 30,000 years after the extinction of the Neanderthals .
I can’t judge how feminine the Neanderthal woman shown here was among her co-ethnics, but she could easily be more feminine within her ethnicity than the modern human woman shown is among her co-ethnics. A comparison of attractiveness would not be fair because the modern human is in a showered and clean state and with make-up, and the dates of birth are tens of thousands of years apart. Tens of thousands of years ago, Homo sapiens (the surviving human species) had more robust facial features, but the ones found in Europe around the time both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens co-existed in Europe had finer facial features than the Neanderthals (Fig 4).
Fig 4. A Cro-Magnon brother and sister pair painting in a cave in Spain, about 20,000 years ago. The image is taken from The Last Human.
Jesus! It's so ugly :O
It looks primitive, fat and repulsive and the way they reconstruct the hair so dishevelled and scruffy and with dirt all over it's face does not help at all. Lucky we don't all look like that nowadays. However, the female neanderthal kind of looks Asian because of it's robust features, wide nose, flattened face and small squinty eyes.
The model was made by a couple of Dutch artists who said they wanted to make something that will make people go "that looks like our aunt ", it is deliberately deceptive in my opinion. Here is the typical Neanderthal skull: the Old Man of Chapell Aux Saints http://www.worldmuseumofman.org/neanderthallechapelle1.htm
The reconstruction shown here is fairly accurate in my opinion http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1050205.ece
Neanderthals had scapulas that made them unable to throw spears but it is holding a long spear.
Neandethals had virtually no chin and according to this site women have less well developed chins but she has an extreme amount of chin compared to the men.
Neanderthals had retreating foreheads and long flat topped skulls with a jutting occuput but it doesn't and the head is way too high.
In Neanderthals the cheekbones and maxillary bone on each side formed a process which pushed the whole nasal region forward the nose was extremely projecting compared to real humans, it has none of this beyond what is observable in many living humans.
It has white skin as do the men, there is no evidence for this at all in Neanderthals
The nose is far smaller and she has fine features compared to the men yes, but the evidence is that the Neanderthal females had far less sexual dimorphism. According to NG they acompanied the males on the hunt this would involve grabbing and stabbing while wrestling the prey to the ground, most of the skeletons have broken bones. The Neanderthal men would probably have some thing like this attractive. That is beside the point this looks like a slightly modified modern human female to me a
Roy: You are dismissing a 6-month fossil reconstruction and citing a painting – and of a man – for a more accurate look! Neanderthals spanned a period of 150,000 years. Over this time their faces became more gracile. National Geographic doesn’t give a date for the female skull fossil, but if it is from the later period of the Neanderthals’ existence, then the faces will be closer to us than the earliest Neanderthal skulls. If the Neanderthal woman looks human, it is because she was a human.
Here is a reconstruction of a 150,000-year-old modern human (Homo sapiens; our species; taken from The Last Human). Contrast the features with those of current Europeans. 150,000 years is a long time for change, and the Neanderthals’ faces were changing over the period of their existence.
I don’t see why you are unable to note that the Neanderthal woman has a poorly developed chin, a very receding forehead and a strong brow. Maybe she didn’t have a very prominent nose because she was quite feminine or it could be an example of variation. Need I point the tremendous geographic variation among current humans regarding nose/mid-facial prominence and the variation that has existed among our species for the past 150,000 years? Why would you not expect a great deal of geographic and temporal variation among Neanderthals?
I doubt that the Neanderthals couldn’t chuck spears. If you have a citation, then let me know. And spears are not just for chucking. You can use them to bash or poke prey/enemy from a safe distance.
Here is what the artists said, 4 pages from back of magazine heading "Inside Geographic", "We want to make a character to recognize, maybe you'll see her and say 'That looks like Aunt Mary'". Another article in the current issue headed "Atomic Age" is a useful index of NG's reliability. By my way of thinking the map of known or suspected nuclear powers is less than exaustive.
You're right in pointing out the "woman" does have a heavier browridge and lower skull than I said, that was carelessness on my part. In my defence; why is her hair teased up like that if not to make the skull look less low and retreating? The maxilla and bony part of the nose is nowere near being prominent compared to the extremely late 45,000 to 30,000 years ago Neanderthal female skull from Gibraltar. This skulls mid-face projection is far more than any fully modern human and it is the mark of a completely different species according to the experts. Neanderthals varied with the climate, they were cold adapted and NG admitts they were without any clothing but draped skins, so they were extremely hairy if not furry. The chin is made to look more retreating than it is because of the swollen and pursed lower lip. Certainly its femininity relative to Neanderthal females would have been very great, however I just don't think any Neanderthal female ever looked like that. Interested in a cite for Neandethal women on hunts grabbing and stabbing prey,and they were almost totally meat eating, how about
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programes/horizon/neanderthal_trans.shml.
NG itself says that the females went on hunts.They matured several years earlier than humans, like chimps.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3085
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/science/05nean.html?_r=3&ex=1166245200&en...
Neanderthal Women Joined Men In The Hunt (New York Times)
"Their skeletons are so robustly built"
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/110522701/abstract
Neandertal Scapular Glenoid Morphology
Steven E Churchil , Eric Trinkaus (1990)
(American Journal Of Physical Anthropology)
The fate of the Neanderthals (Nature article by Paul Mellars) http://cas.belarmine.edu/tietjen/RootWeb/Fate%20of%20Neanderthals.pdf
The second page has a reconstruction of a female.
"Climate change 'did not kill Neanderthals'" (Telegraph)
Closer look at the female Neanderthal's face, The European Neanderthals were, if anything, even more odd looking than this which is based on fossils found in Israel. Now you can see how compared to the NG's farrago this model's orbits conform closely to the female Neanderthal skull shown in NG as does the total absence of a forehead and forward placement of the teeth
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jtml?xml=/earth/2007/09/12/scinean...
John Hawks says the explaination for the fate of Neanderthals could be "complicated metapopulation dynamics...In a nutshell a population sink is a region where the average rate of reproduction is below replacement levels. This region can remain populated only if individuals migrate in from other places.The places that reproduce above replacement are called population sources. ...Europe today is a population sink.The population of the contintent does not produce enough children to replace itself... There are several reasons to suggest that Europe may have been a population sink in prehistory as well".
No suggestion that the "migration gains" of prehistory were anything but irrelevant to the Neandethal demise. The NG model looks like a fully modern human European woman if it looks like anything. On another subject (Steve Jones saying evolution is coming to an end partialy because of population mixing) here is Hawks' last paragraph
"There's also an antiquated version of ethnocentrism here; how can we talk about the future of human evolution without considering the intense dynamics in today's developing nations? Relative to Africa and Asia, Europe is now a population sink.
Two state of the art papers (I hope you will find their methods interesting) and my last word on the subject
Facial Ontologeny in Neanderthals and modern humans.
http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/h6r22v1h8r105711/fulltext.pdf
Neanderthal brain size at birth provides insights into the evolution of human life history.
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/37/13764.full
If you look at the photo with the artists you will see it has blue eyes, they had to change this as research contradicted it so digitally altered to it green brown. This is even more of a problem for the 'eye colour as side effect of pale skin' theory because green unlike blue is not linked to white skin. If Neanderthal females looked anything like the NG model there would have been evidence of widespread hybridisation discovered. There hasn't been so they didn't.
Alex :
Probably she is so ugly like you?.............what's a hell are you saying asian girls look like the female neanderthal? Most asian girls probably are lesser pretty than the caucasian girls but they are way feminier than caucasian girls. if you were male? have you ever been sleep with the asian girls? so you say they are robust lol fuckin shit.......most asian girls are way smell nicer and their skin are so smoother and the shape also fragile, have no body hair when compare to the British and the american trolls are so slow in bed, get over yourself.
Note : I know the caucasian girls got prettier facial's feature however, its very quite a fews who look like the girls on this site, for example, the girls from holland, russia, finlandia, latvia and lithunia. the least of caucasians have got the robust shape and manish nasal, all in all you have to accept that every races have beautiful and ugly people.
feminine 30 years old korean girl.
Masculine 31 years old swedish princess.
Another piece of NG nonsense: the Neanderthals had to consume almost double the calories to support their muscle mass which was (extrapolating from the muscle attachments) double that of fully modern humans. Here is an illustration showing this unlikelyhood in a male, without the morbid obesity of HG's model http://johnberardi.com/articles/nutrition/built1.htm
I have a better solution they were far more powerful because their muscles were weight for weight twice as strong, like chimps. (Vertical jumping performance of bonobos. Scholz)
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