ARCHÆOLOGY

A MONTHLY EXCAVATION OF ODDITIES AND ANTIQUITIES

NEANDERTHAL HELP WITH COVID

In 2002, scuba-diving explorers found a male Palæolithic jawbone, c.40,000 BC, deep within the Peᶊtera cu Oase (“Cave with Bones”), near Anina, Romania. Hailed as the earliest known vestige of early modern humans in Europe, when scientists analysed its DNA in 2015, they were surprised to find it contained roughly three times the amount of Neanderthal DNA found in today’s Europeans. Because the genome contained large stretches of uninterrupted Neanderthal sequences, researchers calculated that the jawbone’s owner