Archaeologica.org

The upshot is that while an HNS female rarely survived birthing a hybrid Cro Magon, which had a rounder skull with a larger cross section, the Cro Magnon female would have far less trouble with an HNS hybrid that had a smaller, but longer skull than her pelvis expected. Thus, out of all the thousands of HNS female lines, only one mtDNA line, from 50,000 BP stayed in the European Gene pool, and only 6 Cro Magnon lines made it.

An ancient bone flute segment, estimated at about 43,ooo up to 82,ooo years old, was found recently at a Neanderthal campsite by Dr. Ivan Turk, a paleontologist at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences in Ljubljana. It's the first flute ever to be associated with Neanderthals and its confirmed age makes it the oldest known musical instrument. The find is also important for its implications regarding the evolution of musical scales. It's to this latter issue my analysis in this article is addressed.

Cognito wrote: DB, I will work on this one but please clarify: which of the seven lines was descended from HNS? Or is that a general statement without any particular preference? (ie check box "f" - any of the above). You realize that in order for HNS mtDNA to pass forward the hybrid must have been a Cro Magnon male with HNS female. Then, the hybrid female must have given an unbroken female descent line to present day.

I've not read Skykes' book. I did see him present his case on TV. I heard him say that the mtDNA existed in Europe 50,000 to 10,000 BP. Simple logic. As noted in this thread, Cro Magnon appeared in Europe 30-40k years ago. Ergo, the 50k mtDNA line was not Cro Magnon. HNS was the only other hominid line there.

Manystones wrote:Beagle,

I think it only fair to point out - to the casual reader at least - that the "famed Neanderthal flute" is not widely considered to be a flute. The jury* is pretty much agreed on this one. It does however raise the wider question of at what point do we attribute "cognition" to our ancestory, upon what evidence and why?

* I believe Min has another name for them.

regards

Beagle wrote:The "casual reader" should know that the bear femur had been hollowed out and had had holes perfectly drilled on one side in a straight line to make a flute. These holes do not match any bear dentition. Musical experts state that it was a flute.

Wiki wrote:Nowell stated in an interview that "at Turk's invitation, [Nowell] and Chase went to Slovenia last year... They came away even more skeptical that the bear bone had ever emitted music. For one thing, both ends had clearly been gnawed away by something, perhaps a wolf, seeking greasy marrow. The holes could have simply been perforated in the process by pointed canine or carnassial teeth, and their roundness could be due to natural damage after the bone was abandoned. The presence of marrow suggests that no one had bothered to hollow out the bone as if to create an end-blown flute. Says Nowell, '[Turk's] willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, whereas we're not.' "

"A well-known example of a controversial musical instrument is that of the so-called Neandertal flute from Divje Babe Cave in Slovenia, found in the Middle Paleolithic layers of the cave and described by the finders as possibly the oldest musical instrument in the world (Fink, 1996; Turk, 1997; Turk et al., 1995). It has been demonstrated (d'Errico et al., 1998a,b) that holes of the same size, shape, and number as those present on the Divje Babe femur occur on cave bear limb bones from cave bear bone accumulations with no human occupation, and that a number of features described as human-made by the discoverers should more likely be interpreted as the result of carnivore damage (Chase and Nowell, 1998).
"A further study (d'Errico, 1998b, 2000) involved detailed analysis of the putative flute and of 77 other perforated bones from different levels of Divje Babe and from four other Slovenian cave bear sites. Among these sites, Krizna Jama is of particular interest as it contains a natural cave bear bone assemblage with no traces of human occupation. A number of variables were recorded. The flute and several others bones were submitted to microscopic analysis. The new study confirms the interpretation of the holes as the result of carnivore damage. In 70% of the cases, the holes on perforated bones are associated with damage characteristic of carnivore action, such as pitting and scoring, and in 20% of the cases, bones show counterbite marks in the form of opposing perforations, or perforations opposite to impressions produced by tooth pressure. Seventy-three percent of the perforated bones belong to young bears, as is the case for the putative flute.
"Holes occur in almost all bones, but they are particularly abundant on limb bones and among them, on femora, the bone on which the purported flute was carved. The presence of two or possibly three perforations on the suggested flute cannot therefore be considered as evidence of human manufacture, as this is a common feature in the studied sample. In the same way, the relatively large size of the holes does not indicate anthropic carving. In fact, the maximum and minimum diameters of the holes on the putative flute are close to the mean value of those of the comparative faunal sample. Moreover, the correlation between the maximum and minimum diameter in this sample indicates a clear tendency towards slightly elongated holes, the same pattern that we observe when measuring the two complete holes of the suggested flute. In the Slovenian sample, 28% of the holes occur in compact bone. The majority of these have only one hole, but bones with two or more holes are also present.
"Another femur of a young cave bear from the same site shows two holes very similar in size and shape to those on the supposed flute, recorded on the same face and in the same anatomical position. Nonetheless, this object could never have been 'playable,' as its epiphyses were not completely opened. Microscopic analysis of the putative flute itself confirms the natural origin of the holes. Many traces typical of carnivore action, such as scoring and pitting, were found near the holes and the ends of the bone (Fig. 9). Clear tooth impressions are also present on the face opposite the holes. The distribution of different types of carnivore damage on the bone surface is consistent with the interpretation of the two holes as resulting from carnivore action. A large deep impression found on the anterior face near the proximal end, indicating strong pressure exerted by carnivore teeth, can reasonably be interpreted as the counterbite of the anterior hole.
"The presence of pitting near the two holes suggests that carnivore teeth touched this area repeatedly. The presence of scoring and pitting at both ends, associated with other traces produced by carnivores, confirms that the bone was heavily damaged by carnivores. In sum, all the evidence suggests that the perforations on the so called Divje Babe 'flute,' like other damage on the same bone, were produced by nonhuman agents. The most probable agent would appear to be the cave bears themselves; the frequency distribution of the hole diameters recorded in the Slovenian sample is very similar to that observed on sites where cave bear is the only species represented, and we have tangible proof that a cave bear could produce large holes in bones with its teeth.
"Of course, this does not mean that Neandertals were unable to manufacture and play musical instruments. It simply means that we cannot use this object to support that hypothesis and that a taphonomic analysis of putative ancient musical instruments is an essential prerequisite to any discussion of their significance for the origin of musical tradition and the evolution of human cognitive abilities."

This claim is harder to believe when it is calculated that chances for holes to be arranged, by chance, in a pattern that matches the spacings of 4 notes of a diatonic flute, are only one in hundreds to occur .
The analysis I made on the Internet (http://www.webster.sk.ca/greenwich/fl-compl.htm) regarding the bone being capable of matching 4 notes of the do, re, mi (diatonic) scale included the possibility that the bone was extended with another bone "mouthpiece" sufficiently long to make the notes sound fairly in tune. While Nowell says "it's a big leap of faith to conclude that this was an intentionally constructed flute," it's a bigger leap of faith to accept the immense coincidence that animals blindly created a hole-spacing pattern with holes all in line (in what clearly looks like so many other known bone flutes which are made to play notes in a step-wise scale) and blindly create a pattern that also could play a known acoustic scale if the bone was extended. That's too much coincidence for me to accept. It is more likely that it is an intentionally made flute, although admittedly with only the barest of clues regarding its original condition.

I've not read Skykes' book. I did see him present his case on TV. I heard him say that the mtDNA existed in Europe 50,000 to 10,000 BP. Simple logic. As noted in this thread, Cro Magnon appeared in Europe 30-40k years ago. Ergo, the 50k mtDNA line was not Cro Magnon. HNS was the only other hominid line there.

The new analysis was triggered by differences in the methods and results in the two papers that were published on the topic. A paper in Science described cloning Neanderthal DNA in bacteria, and then sequencing it. The one in Nature sequenced amplified DNA directly. Although there was substantial agreement between the two, the Nature paper suggested that modern humans and Neanderthals shared a common ancestor more recently, and may have interbred after their separation.

The authors of the PLoS paper obtained the original sequence data from both papers, and performed a new analysis of it. They discovered that the data in the Nature paper contains sequence differences that appear to have arisen recently within the human lineage, which suggested something was wrong. Performing an estimation of the human-Neanderthal split date using the Nature data produced a value of 35,000 years, which is completely incompatible with the fossil record. Finally, using a date of 350,000 years for the split (obtained using the data from the Science paper), they found that the Nature data indicated extremely high levels of interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals; the Science data continued to suggest there was none.

All of these results point to one conclusion: the Neanderthal sequence in the Nature paper looks far more like that of modern humans than any other data would suggest is possible. Of course, there's a simple and obvious explanation for that discrepancy: the sequence is from modern humans.

The new paper explores this via the following reasoning: ancient DNA is more likely to be damaged and fragmented, and so contamination is more likely to appear in longer, less damaged fragments. They divided the Nature sequence data according to the length into short, medium, and long pools. The short fragments give an age estimate for the Neanderthal-human split that's essentially identical to the one obtained with the Science data. But, as the fragments get longer, the age shrinks. When fragments greater than 100 bases long are examined, they give an age estimate for the split that is younger than some splits within modern human populations. Thus, the longer fragments are very likely to be contamination from modern humans.

The authors recognize that more work needs to be done to sort out some remaining discrepancies, but the new analysis strongly suggests that a large portion of the original data was the result of contamination. We know less about the Neanderthals than we thought we did. Still, the analysis suggests that there is real Neanderthal sequence among the contaminants, and suggests a fairly simple analysis may help us extract it. It's a great example of how science can self-correct.