What Makes Us Human

Tantalizing new findings suggest that neanderthals, our human cousins, are a lot like us. How, then, did we manage to win the evolutionary competition?

- By Adam Piore

Nearly 40,000 years after disappearing from the planet, Neanderthals are having a moment. In recent years, tantalizing new evidence suggests that our primitive, heavy-browed cousins were chefs, jewelry-makers and painters. And what we are learning from the genetic clues they left behind-and the promise of what those clues will tell us about ourselves in the years ahead-won Swedish paleo-geneticist Svante Pääbo the 2022 Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology this fall.

The most recent discoveries, un-earthed in a Siberian cave, show why scientists are so excited. By Neanderthal standards, the Chagyrskaya Cave qualified as luxury housing. The two-chambered, cliffside cavity in Southern Siberia's Altai Mountains boasted a three-story-high limestone entrance overlooking a vast, green river valley, from which residents could easily have spotted herds of migrating bison, horses, reindeer and other tasty game, or just reveled in the cave's King of the World views. "It's the perfect place," says Bence Viola, a paleontologist at the University of Toronto, who studies ancient humans.

Which is why Viola, a jovial, thirty-something Hungarian-born scientist who describes field work as "camping with friends," wasn't surprised when a longtime Russian collaborator pulled a fossilized mandible in a plastic bag out of his shirt pocket one vodka-fueled evening at a conference in 2010, and boisterously declared: "I have a surprise for you!" Viola was able to confirm by sight that the remarkably well-preserved fossil, dug out of the recently discovered cave's entrance, had come from a Neanderthal.