With all the attention given to the study of Neanderthals over the years, you’d think by now we’d know everything that made these early humans different from us. But paleoanthropologists Ian Tattersall, of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and Jeffrey Schwartz, of the University of Pittsburgh, have found something new in the Neanderthal nose. When we started this work, says Tattersall, we thought, ‘My God, people have been looking at Neanderthals for well over 100 years. How could we possibly find anything they haven’t noticed?’
One of the reasons may be that the unique nasal features they discovered aren’t preserved in most Neanderthal skulls. Of the 20 Neanderthal skulls the anthropologists looked at, they found the structures in only eight--the relevant parts of the nasal sections of the other skulls had been destroyed. But in those eight, Schwartz and Tattersall saw two triangular bony projections jutting ...
