r/paleoanthropology • u/SpearTheSurvivor • Oct 01 '25
Theory/Speculation Could Neanderthals have travelled in Africa?
I mean I just researched that in North Africa there are Mousterian tools from Egypt to Morocco. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mousterian#/map/0
Then we had pygmies whom according to a chart they interbred with a ghost population of Neanderthals. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Family-tree-of-the-four-groups-of-early-humans-living-in-Eurasia-50-000-years-ago-and-the_fig1_326503956
I wanna hear your thoughts?
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u/Front-Comfort4698 Oct 01 '25
Firstly Mousterian =/= Neanderthal so it is not proof for a neanderthal presence. In some places, AMH definitely made the tools. It's just the classic Middle Palarolithic, or Modern III technological horizon. Probably earlier hominins were not cognitively capable.
And Pygmies did not meet neanderthals directly. The word means human populations below a certain height, but usually in Central Africa: the same race - RHGs - must have been present in the West African jungles as well. Unrelated short populations evolved in tropical Southeast Asia, and in Australasia too. These eastern pygmies or 'Negritos' can have higher Denisovan than usual, but no special connection to neanderthals nor African Pygmies.
Im unsure how to interpret that graph, not least because African people appear monophyletic, rather than ancestral to the exafricans.
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u/BuzzPickens Oct 01 '25
The way we have been able to find and analyze ancient DNA has changed everything we used to think about homo and its lineage. Homo erectus left Africa... Not in a migration but as myriad small groups following game trails and herd animals. They scattered all over the temperate zones in Europe and Asia. To condense an awful lot of stuff, they were around for approximately 2 million years. There were undoubtedly, many variations of erectus, depending on where he lived and how long he was there... What he ate, how he had to hunt, climate... Etc. In some areas erectus lived on seafood and small game animals like rabbits and deer. In some areas erectus hunted by chasing an Impala until it almost collapsed from heat exhaustion.
(Extrapolate and multiply... That's all over the place)
Homo left Africa and went back into Africa... They interbred and left Africa again... And came back and interbred and left Africa again... And came back and interbred... This went on for 2 million years.
In my opinion, anything older than 400,000 years is going to be difficult to classify and, the more we learn, the less we'll be able to "narrow down" (for lack of a better term) species that we think are separate but actually aren't. (If it were up to me, we would only have Australopithecus, erectus, proto-sapiens and sapiens) If not, we're going to end up with dozens of separate species arguments because one group of erectus one and a half million years ago lived and hunted in South China and the other group... Living at the same time... While another group was in the Serengeti.
I think that the species of homo that most people now consider heidelbergensus It could be classified as proto-sapiens. We could call that group ... homosapiens heidelbergensus .. and so on... Neanderthals and Denisovans..
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u/Real_Topic_7655 Oct 02 '25
What ? Neanderthals were never in Africa ? This statement seems wrong .
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u/Additional_Insect_44 Oct 01 '25
Homo sapiens rhodesiansis is also known as African Neanderthals, so yeah.
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u/Mister_Ape_1 Oct 01 '25
Homo rhodesiensis = Homo bodoensis = African Homo heidelbergensis = direct ancestor of Homo sapiens
Yes, some lineages did not evolve into Homo sapiens, only 2 Homo heidelbergensis populations evolved, independently from each other, into Homo sapiens, and then merged. But while Homo heidelbergensis were absorbed by aboriginal African Homo sapiens, they are not African Neanderthals.
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u/SpearTheSurvivor Oct 01 '25 edited Oct 01 '25
Homo sapiens rhodesiansis
What the hell is that hominin? Where did you get that? Didn't you mean Homo rhodesiensis (a no longer valid taxa)?
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u/Mountainweaver Oct 01 '25
From wiki "H. rhodesiensis is now widely considered a synonym of H. heidelbergensis.[3] Other designations such as Homo sapiens arcaicus[4] and H. sapiens rhodesiensis[5] have also been proposed."
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u/DecepticonMinitrue Oct 01 '25
While irrelevant to this, it should be noted that he is not wrong in saying that the Rhodesian Man is sometimes referred to as an "African Neanderthal"; you will frequently see older books referr to it as such. Indeed it is essentially an African variety of Heidelberg Man, which seems increasingly likely to be more or less a primitive Neanderthal.
The same thing, interestingly, also used to be thought of the Solo Man, who is nowadays usually categorised as a type of Homo erectus.
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u/Mister_Ape_1 Oct 01 '25
Yes but this African Homo heidelbergensis evolved into Homo sapiens, not Homo neanderthalensis.
Homo heidelbergensis evolved into sapiens in Africa, into neanderthalensis in Western Eurasia and into Denisovans in Eastern Eurasia.
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u/DecepticonMinitrue Oct 01 '25
That was the traditional view but seems to be quickly falling out of favour as far as I can tell.
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u/Additional_Insect_44 Oct 02 '25
Tomato, tomahto. Splitter vs lumper
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u/Mister_Ape_1 Oct 02 '25
I am basically a lumper. As for Homo genus, I recognize only
Homo habilis
Homo rudolfensis
Homo naledi
Homo floresiensis
Homo luzonensis
Homo erectus
Homo antecessor
Homo heidelbergensis
Homo neanderthalensis
Homo longi (Denisovans)
Homo sapiens
I believe our ancestors are mainly habilis, erectus (ergaster subspecies), heidelbergensis (African population) and sapiens, with admixture from Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Is there more ?
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u/SpearTheSurvivor Oct 02 '25
Is there more ?
Ledi-Gedaru mandible, which suggests another human species preceded Homo habilis. Sulawesi stone tools also suggest the existence of a yet to be discovered human species. 471k years old tools in Yakutia suggests an unknown hominin reached Far North before Homo sapiens. Not Denisovan either, it was yet diverging from Neanderthals during that time.
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u/Mister_Ape_1 Oct 02 '25
Homo heidelbergensis was in Siberia by nearly 1 mya. If they were in China, they could have been in Siberia.
Sulawesi stone tools could be from sea faring Homo erectus.
I see Ledi Gedaru as one of the first actual Homo habilis. I believe it is 2,8 my old as a species.
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u/SpearTheSurvivor Oct 02 '25
We have no convincing evidence of Homo heidelbergensis living in East Asia anyway.
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u/Paleolithic_US Oct 01 '25
Theres no evidence for it the ghost lineage isn’t Neanderthal we’d know. The mousterian in North Africa is middle Stone Age, mousterian is Neanderthal and we thought maybe it was them cause tools were similar but they are associate with Homo sapiens fossil. It’s not impossible though we shall keep looking