Expert: John Shea - 5/27/2004

Question
I have seen tons of theories on the evolutionary hominid family tree.  

Yet I am wondering if there are direct correlations of Neanderthal evolving from Homo-Erectus in Northern Europe by the archaeological evidence being disseminated from the Gran Dolina findings of Homo Erectus arriving to Spain ca > 1,000,000 years ago?

Or do you have direct mtDNA evidence that this could never have happened?  If so can you help me find it?

Thanks!

Answer
Dear Mark,
The Atapuerca Sima de los Huesos fossils pretty clearly show morphologies that anticipate Neandertals.  The link between these fossils and the much older H. antecessor ones from TD-6 are a bit more tenuous as the TD-6 fossils are very fragmentary.
There is no MtDNA from these ancient fossils, but analysis of Neandertal DNA puts the split between Neandertals and Homo sapiens ca. 500-600,000 years ago, between the dates for H. antecessor and the Atapuerca H. heidelbergensis fossils.
Neandertals are unlikely to have evolved in northern Europe. Repeated glaciations between 900,000-130,000 bp probably either wiped out or drove southward human populations north of the Alps in Europe.  The core region of European human/hominin settlement ( H. antecessor, heidelbergensis, neanderthalensis) was probably the Mediterranean watershed of Europe and the Near East.
(The idea that Neandertals were strongly linked to north European habitats is kind of an artifact of discovery.  Many of the early discoveries of Neandertals fossils (Neandertal, Spy, Engis) were made in north European countries.  In fact, most of these fossils date to rather late periods, 45-70 Kyr.)
A good recent publication on all this is
Klein, R. G. (2003). Whither the Neanderthals? Science 299: 1525-1527.
There is also a good overview of the Atapuerca evidence in
Bermudez de Castro, J. M., Marintón-Torres, M., Carbonell, E., Sarmiento, S., Rosas, A., van der Made, J. and Lozano, M. (2004). The Atapuerca Sites and Their Contribution to the Knowledge of Human Evolution in Europe. Evolutionary Anthropology 13: 25-41.
Cheers,
John Shea