Sea gives up Neanderthal fossil
By Paul Rincon
Science reporter,
BBC News
June 15, 2009
The fragment of skull belonged to a young adult male
Part of a Neanderthal man's skull has been dredged up from the North Sea, in the first confirmed find of its kind.
Scientists in Leiden, in the Netherlands, have unveiled the specimen - a fragment from the front of a skull belonging to a young adult male.
Analysis of chemical "isotopes" in the 60,000-year-old fossil suggest a carnivorous diet, matching results from other Neanderthal specimens.
The North Sea is one of the world's richest areas for mammal fossils.
But the remains of ancient humans are scarce; this is the first known specimen to have been recovered from the sea bed anywhere in the world.
For most of the last half million years, sea levels were substantially lower than they are today.
Significant areas of the North Sea were, at times, dry land. Criss-crossed by river systems, with wide valleys, lakes and floodplains, these were rich habitats for large herds of ice age mammals such as horse, reindeer, woolly rhino and mammoth.
" Even with this rather limited fragment of skull,
it is possible to securely identify this as Neanderthal"
Jean-Jacques Hublin,
Max Planck Institute
Their fossilised remains are brought ashore in large numbers each year by fishing trawlers and other dredging operations.
According to Professor Chris Stringer, from London's Natural History Museum, some fishermen now concentrate on collecting fossils rather than their traditional catch.
"There were mammoth fossils collected off the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts 150 years ago, so we've known for some time there was material down there that was of this age, or even older," Professor Stringer, a museum research leader, told BBC News. Indeed, some of the fossil material from the North Sea dates to the Cromerian stage, between 866,000 and 478,000 years ago.
It had been "only a matter of time", he said, before a human fossil came to light.
Professor Stringer added: "The key thing for the future is getting this material in a better context.
"It would be great if we could get the technology one day to go down and search (in the sea floor) where we can obtain the dating, associated materials and other information we would get if we were excavating on land."
