No one knows what Adam and Eve looked like and how their lives ended. According to Jewish tradition, the pair were buried in the Machpelah Cave in Hebron, where all the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish People except for Rachel – Abraham, Sarah, Rebekah, Isaac, Jacob, and Leah – found their resting place.
As the sun and moon were not created until the fourth day of creation and the first three “days” could have been billions of years long, believers in the Bible should have no problem thinking about prehistoric beings that existed before Adam and Eve.
Israeli researchers, as part of an international team, have since 1983 been busy studying the bones of Neanderthals –a separate species from modern humans that became extinct and were replaced by modern humans moving into their habitat.
Now, scientists at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv – along with an international team – have reconstructed a Neanderthal ribcage, offering new clues to ancient human anatomy
The team of scientists completed the first 3D virtual reconstruction of chest bones of the most complete Neanderthal skeleton unearthed to date, potentially shedding new light on how this ancient human moved and breathed. Their study has just been published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Communications.
The team, which included researchers from universities in Israel, Spain, and the US, focused on the thorax – the area of the body containing the rib cage and upper spine – which forms a cavity to house the heart and lungs. Using CT scans of fossils from an about 60,000-year-old male skeleton known as Kebara 2, researchers were able to create a 3D model of the chest. They found that it is different from the longstanding image of the barrel-chested, hunched-over “caveman.” The conclusions point to what may have been an upright individual with different breathing pattern and a straighter spine than today’s modern human.
“The shape of the thorax is key to understanding how Neanderthals moved in their environment because it informs us about their breathing and balance,” said Ella Been, a researcher at Ono Academic College and the study’s senior author. “Neanderthals are closely related to us with complex cultural adaptations much like those of modern humans, but their physical form is different from us in important ways,” she said. “Understanding their adaptations allows us to understand our own evolutionary path better.”
And how Neanderthals moved would have had a direct impact on their ability to survive on the resources available to them, said Alon Barash, a researcher at the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine of Bar-Ilan University, one of the leading researchers of the team.
Neanderthals are a type of human that emerged about 400,000 years ago, living mostly from what is today Western Europe to Central Asia. They were hunter-gatherers who, in some areas, lived in caves and who weathered several glacial periods before going extinct about 30,000 years ago. Studies in recent years have suggested that Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens interbred, because evidence of Neanderthal DNA has turned up in many populations.
Over the past 150 years, Neanderthal remains have been found at many sites in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. This team worked with a skeleton labeled Kebara 2, also known as “Moshe,” after Moshe Shtekelis, a well-known Israeli archaeologist, which was found in Kebara Cave in northern Israel’s Carmel mountain range in 1983.
Though the cranium is missing, the remains of the young adult male are considered one of the most complete Neanderthal skeletons ever found. Two different forms of dating of the surrounding soil, thermoluminescence and electron spin resonance, put the age at somewhere between 59,000 and 64,000 years.
Discoveries and studies of other Neanderthal remains in the 19th and early 20th centuries led to theories and images of a stereotypical, hunched-over caveman. Over time, further research clarified scientific understanding of many Neanderthal traits, but some debate has lingered over the structure of the thorax, the capacity of the lungs and what conditions Neanderthals might have been able to adapt to, or not.
Over the past decade, virtual reconstruction has become more common in biological anthropology, Barash explained. The approach is useful with fossils such as the thorax, where fragile bones make physical reconstruction difficult and risky.
About two years ago, the same research team created a virtual reconstruction of the Kebara 2 spine – the first step in updating theories of Neanderthal biomechanics. The team’s paper, published in the book “Human Paleontology and Prehistory,” reaffirmed the likelihood of upright posture but pointed to a straighter spine than that of modern humans.
For this model of the thorax, researchers used both direct observations of the Kebara 2 skeleton, currently housed at Tel Aviv University, and medical CT scans of vertebrae, ribs and pelvic bones, along with 3D software designed for scientific use. “This was meticulous work,” said Barash. “We had to CT scan each vertebra and all of the ribs fragments individually and then reassemble them in 3D.”
They then used a technique called geometric morphometric analysis to compare the images of Neanderthal bones with medical scans of bones from present-day adult men. “In the reconstruction process, it was necessary to virtually ‘cut’ and realign some of the parts that showed deformation, and mirror-image some of those that were not so well-preserved in order to get a complete thorax,” said Asier Gomez-Olivencia, an Ikerbasque Fellow at the University of the Basque Country and the studies leading researcher.
The reconstruction of the thorax, coupled with the team’s earlier finding, shows ribs that connect to the spine in an inward direction, forcing the chest cavity outward, with little of the lumbar curve that is part of the modern human skeletal structure. “The differences between a Neanderthal and modern human thorax are striking,” said Markus Bastir, senior research scientist at the laboratory of virtual anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History in Spain.
“The Neanderthal spine is located more inside the thorax, which provides more stability,” said Patricia Kramer professor in the UW Department of Anthropology. “Also, the thorax is wider in its lower part.” This shape of the rib cage suggests a larger diaphragm and thus, greater lung capacity.
“The wide lower thorax of Neanderthals and the horizontal orientation of the ribs suggest that Neanderthals relied more on their diaphragm for breathing,” said Been. “Modern humans, on the other hand, rely both on the diaphragm and on the expansion of the rib cage for breathing. Here we see how new technologies in the study of fossil remains is providing new information to understand extinct species.”
What that means for how Kebara 2 lived requires further research, Been said. How did Neanderthals breathe and for what physical demands might they have needed powerful lungs? What does that tell us about how they moved, and the environment in which they lived? Did any of these physical traits make them more or less adaptive to climate change?
Reconstructing the thorax was an exercise in starting from scratch, deliberately trying to avoid being influenced by past theories of how Neanderthals looked or lived, Barash added.
“Thinking through all the permutations of the different fragments, it was like a jigsaw without all the pieces. What do the pieces tell us?” he asked rhetorically. “People have told you it should be a certain way, but you want to make sure you’re not over-reconstructing, or reconstructing it the way you think it should be. You’re trying to maintain a neutral approach.”
