If we compare the faces of people from northern Europe with those of Africans we will notice a few differences. Some obvious (the color of the skin, the eyes…) and others less, like the shape of his nose. The former is usually a tall and narrow nose, while the latter is low and wide. What accounts for this difference? Basically, it is an adaptation to the climate. Apart from breathing, the nostrils also serve to warm and humidify the air before it reaches the lungs. A large nasal cavity (such as many Europeans sport) would then be an advantage in cold climates, but not an advantage in warmer areas. This is nothing new. It was discovered by the British anthropologist and anatomist Arthur Thomson 150 years ago and was confirmed in 2017 thanks to a study by the University of Pennsylvania.
It is news, however, that the high nose of the Nordics could be an inheritance from the Neanderthals. This is confirmed by research published in the journal ‘Communications Biology’. “Humans inherit genetic material from Neanderthals that affects the shape of our nose. The gene we have identified may have been inherited to help humans adapt to colder climates when our ancestors moved from Africa.”
To reach this conclusion, the researchers used data from more than 6,000 volunteers from Latin America, of mixed European, Native American, and African ancestry. They compared the participants’ genetic information with photographs of their faces to see how different facial features were related to the presence of different genetic markers. And they discovered that many of the participants had a gene that contributed to the greater ‘height’ of the nose. This same team already discovered something else about our face in 2021: the shape of our lips we owe to the Denisovans, another species of hominid discovered in southwestern Siberia that lived with both Neanderthals and Sapiens.
That of the high nose is not the only inheritance that the Neanderthals left us, according to several studies. On the plus side, some of your genes strengthened our immune system and with it our ability to ward off infection, and you also have the genetics that protect us from ‘bad’ cholesterol. On the negative side, we owe them the accumulation of visceral fat, rheumatoid arthritis, schizophrenia, being more vulnerable to covid and a propensity for allergies.
What were the Neanderthals like?
The image of Neanderthals as brute, primitive and even cannibalistic beings who, a little less than 30,000 years ago, lost the race for survival with Homo Sapiens due to their intellectual inferiority, has long since been left behind. It is not known exactly why they disappeared -there is talk of the aforementioned competition from our direct ancestors, of the reduction of their food sources, of their lesser social organization, of a marked inbreeding…-, but it is known that they made tools, they they dressed, buried their dead, cared for the elderly and the sick, controlled the fire and even made paintings.
It was also believed that both species had not interbred until in 2008 when the genome of our ‘cousins’ could be sequenced. Since then, it is known that between 1.8% and 2.6% of our genome is Neanderthal, which explains heredities such as the high nose. This finding – that of the sequencing of his DNA – earned him the Nobel Prize in Medicine last year for the Swedish biologist Svante Pääbo.
Physically, Neanderthals were shorter than we are – males were between 1.64 and 1.69 meters tall; they, about ten centimeters less, but much more robust, since they weighed about 85 kilos. As in the case of the nostrils, this could be due to a simple matter of adaptation to the cold since they had to live during the ice ages in much of the European continent. The so-called ‘Bergman rule’ establishes that populations of a warm-blooded species that live in cold regions tend to have larger bodies than those that live in warmer areas. The reason is that this rounded shape would reduce its surface area per unit volume, thus minimizing heat loss. Something similar to what happens today with the Eskimos compared to the Tuaregs, taller and more slender.
As for his face, it extended forward in the shape of a wedge, unlike ours, which is flatter. Her brain was larger (1,500 cubic centimeters vs. 1,350 today), although due to her greater weight, the ratio is still favorable to Sapiens. They ate more meat than us, had less olfactory capacity and some could not perceive the bitter taste, something also present in modern humans and strange from an evolutionary point of view because this taste is usually associated with poison -hence it generates rejection-. It is also known that some had fair skin and reddish hair. Regarding their organization, they lived in groups of about 3,000 individuals in which the males used to stay and the females were the ones that moved to avoid inbreeding.
The first remains of Neanderthals were discovered in 1830 in the Belgian town of Engis: the skull of a 2 or 3 year old child. It was followed in 1848 by another skull found in Gibraltar and in 1856 by a skeleton in the Neander Valley – Neander Tal, in Germany, hence the name given to this species. But it was not until the end of the 19th century that it was definitively accepted that all those remains actually belonged to a new species instead of atypical or pathological cases of modern humans.
#Nordics #thinner #noses #Africans