Like bringing to life a naked mannequin, scientists are using genetic and physical evidence found in fossils to clothe the skeletal remains of our closest hominid relatives, the Neanderthals. More and more, they seem familiar. Bones from two Neanderthals yielded valuable genetic information that adds red hair, light skin and perhaps some freckling to our extinct relatives. The results, detailed online today by the journal Science, suggest that at least 1 percent of Neanderthals were redheads. ‘We can’t say anything for the actual fossils we looked at, but we can be sure that part of the Neanderthal population was red-haired,’ said study team member Michael Hofreiter of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Earlier this month, other scientists reported genetic evidence that Neanderthals may have spoken similar to how we do today. Pigment gene Neanderthals inhabited the plains of Europe and parts of Asia as far back as 230,000 years ago. They disappeared from the fossil record more than 20,000 years ago, a few thousand years after modern humans appeared on the scene. Holger Rompler of the University of Leipzig, Carles Lalueza-Fox […]