What prehistoric man can teach the modern world

A VISIT to Cyprus by one of the world’s foremost paleoanthropologists has coincided with the release of fascinating evidence to suggest that interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals may have taken place.
“If you had asked me a month ago, I would have said they were too genetically different, and they are probably more similar to our common ancestor, Homo erectus, than us,” Dr Yoel Rak told the Sunday Mail in an interview ahead of a lecture at Nicosia University.
“However, last week a draft of the Neanderthals genome [genetic code] was released, and this shows a small amount of interbreeding took place.”
In the 20 years the anthropology professor from Tel Aviv university has spent in this field, he has examined the remains of the earliest humans from Europe and Africa, and last Thursday’s lecture covered a period in history when the two species coexisted in the Middle East.
“About 100,000 years ago the territories between the two overlapped. Neanderthals were mostly European while Homo sapiens were from Africa, and as so often happens in the Middle East it is the borderline between two populations.”
Unlike in the modern Middle East, however, the two populations seemed to live peacefully with no evidence of violent confrontation. Then, around 30,000 years ago, Homo sapiens entered Europe, shortly before the less intelligent Neanderthals finally died out in an ice age 29,000 years ago in southern Spain.
This last detail suggests to Rak that Neanderthals probably did not make it to Cyprus. “I suspect they did not come here, because in Spain they could not apparently cross the Gibraltar Strait, even though it was narrower [than the sea between Cyprus and the nearest mainland]. Maybe they did not have the ability to cross water, or were not comfortable travelling south,” he said.
Rak’s study of the area in which they cohabited is not just valuable to historians or anatomists, but can offer insight into various disciplines from sociology to medicine, and perhaps even the Cyprus Problem!
For example his research into the contrast between species gives us clues about the origins of ethnicity and the tribal instinct. “It is fascinating how modern humans are genetically one, but so variable on the surface.”
While a lot of this variety, such as skin colour, comes from adaptation to the environment, the origins of many non-functional differences were unknown until our species was contrasted with the Neanderthals.
The answer lies in Homo sapiens’ unique adaptation, the brain. “The Homo sapiens brain is a unique specialisation in the animal kingdom,” he said. “The more it becomes specialised, the less dependent it is on environmental conditions, and we can survive all over the world.”
This more sophisticated brain allowed early man to appreciate aesthetics, as shown by cave paintings and bone sculptures. However this has also influenced our genes and led to the formation of tribes, because men began to choose partners based on aesthetics. “Neanderthals had fire, buried their dead and they had the same toolkit as Homo sapiens. Nevertheless, they show no evidence of any appreciation of art or aesthetic preferences.”
Rak gives example of a village on the Ethiopia-Somali border, where he has studied the famous remains of a prehistoric woman (named Lucy)
On one side of the river the people were very dark, and on the other light. “We could not explain this until somebody told me that up to recently, when a light Sudanese child was born that was not dark enough, it would be dumped in the river. Not every variation comes from such cruelty, but this tells you that a lot of aesthetics, fashion and tribalism are involved in shaping variation.”
This aesthetic tendency eventually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, filtering into our genes and making what Rak calls “genetic rifts”. Eventually this leads to such things as flags, styles of beard and language for example.
But behind all these decorations, surface variations and artificially constructed ethnicities, says Rak, we are one people.
“We humans domesticate and bred ourselves like dogs, or pigeons, or roses, but the interesting thing is that, like dogs we remain the same species.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.