Neanderthals’ hefty noses weren’t well adapted to cold climates

First analysis of a well-preserved nasal cavity in human fossil record found that the Neanderthal's hefty nose was not adapted to cold climates, as many thought.

Neanderthals (Neanderthal man) lived approximately between 400,000 and 40,000 years ago, and Some specimens have been found with distinct structures in the nasal cavities. which have been proposed as defining features of the species. Some researchers suggest that living in repeated glacial conditions led them to develop these structures to adapt to cold weather by helping them warm inhaled air inside their characteristic large noses..

However, the structures discovered so far are generally damaged, and conclusive fossil evidence for a complete picture of the Neanderthal nose is lacking.

Constantino Busi from the University of Perugia in Italy and his colleagues have now obtained such evidence from a Neanderthal specimen known as Altamura Manwhich is between 172,000 and 130,000 years old. The skeleton is walled into the rock of the Lamalunga cave near the southern Italian city of Altamura and covered with so-called popcorn nodules – small nodules of calcite – that give it the appearance of a coral reef.

“This is probably the most complete human fossil ever discovered,” Boosie says. But the fragile specimen couldn't be removed, so he and his colleagues carried their equipment through narrow parts of the cave and used an endoscope to peer inside the skull, allowing them to digitally reconstruct its well-preserved internal nasal bone structures.

“This is certainly the first time we've seen these structures clearly in human fossils,” Boosie says.

Surprisingly, there were no signs of internal features of the nose that were considered defining features of Neanderthals, including a bony ridge known as the vertical medial projection, swelling on the walls of the nasal cavity, and the absence of a bony roof over the tear trough.

But Altamura man is, by all accounts, undoubtedly a Neanderthal. morphology, dating and geneticssays Boosie. This means that these nasal structures should no longer be considered defining Neanderthal features, he says, and it is unlikely that the large nose and prominent upper jaw were formed by them. “Finally, we can say that some features that were thought to be diagnostic in the Neanderthal skull do not exist,” Busey says.

He said Neanderthals' larger nasal cavity was simply due to a larger skull structure, although his team found that the turbinates – scroll-like structures on the walls of the nasal cavity – were quite large, which helped warm the air inside.

“These results suggest that the typical Neanderthal face shape was not due to respiratory adaptation to cold, but rather to developmental factors and overall body proportions,” says Ludovic Slimak at the University of Toulouse in France. “The study challenges long-held ideas about Neanderthal evolution and provides the first direct evidence of what their respiratory system actually looked and functioned.”

The study also echoes another one from September by some of the same researchers, suggesting that it was a unique adaptation of the neck, acquired under the selective pressures of a glacial environment, that led to the evolution of the Neanderthal face, including their protruding jaw.

“With Neanderthals, everything is shoehorned into this idea that they are cold-adapted, which is complete nonsense,” he says. Todd Ray at the University of Sussex, UK. “My guess is that anatomically they probably struggled with the cold, especially since tropical humans – us – thrived and went extinct during the Last Glacial Maximum.”

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