The Mysterious Downfall of the Neandertals

By Miss Cellania in Science & Tech on Jul 30, 2009 at 9:08 am

The standard theories of why Neandertals disappeared 28,000 years ago don’t hold up, so scientists are looking in new directions. The assimilation/interbreeding theory should’ve yielded some DNA evidence, but there is none. The replacement/war theory isn’t as cut and dried as it could be, since modern humans lived in the same territories as Neandertals for 15,000 years. Climate change? Sure, the earth was cooling at the time, but Neandertals had lived through ice ages before.

But the isotope data reveal that far from progressing steadily from mild to frigid, the climate became increasingly unstable heading into the last glacial maximum, swinging severely and abruptly. With that flux came profound ecological change: forests gave way to treeless grassland; reindeer replaced certain kinds of rhinoceroses. So rapid were these oscillations that over the course of an individual’s lifetime, all the plants and animals that a person had grown up with could vanish and be replaced with unfamiliar flora and fauna. And then, just as quickly, the environment could change back again.

Scientists are looking into the idea that Neandertals just weren’t as adaptable as modern humans, and over time lost out in the competition for resources in a changing world. Link -via Metafilter


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  1. A.Mercer
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 10:00 am

    Interesting, so if this is true then it is possible for humans to see a radical change in environment in a short time period without it being caused by man made global warming.

  2. Gauldar
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 10:14 am

    We all know that the truth is the Neandertals were pussies and crushed them under the might of our iron fist. It’s what we do!

  3. Kalel
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 10:53 am

    Five pages of analysis, and not one mention that perhaps we simply outbred our Neanderthal cousins?

    It’s one of the most effective methods of conquest, and the most fun.

  4. Mitch
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 11:26 am

    They all moved to the Basque region, silly.

  5. Johnny Cat
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 11:30 am

    They found ancient writings from the homo sapiens addressed to the Neanderthals that read:

    ur doing it wrongz! lol u suk.

  6. DannyArcher
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 11:36 am

    the aliens kidnapped them and ditched their ‘human’ pet on planet earth.

  7. ourconour
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 12:08 pm

    we ate em. and I can still taste em in my mouth. like chicken.

  8. Mytake
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 12:45 pm

    I’m 99% sure they spent too much time looking in awe at a mysterious black monolith and then bludgeoned each other to death with bones.

  9. Foreigner1
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 1:01 pm

    I know what they say and I know that the tests don’t show it. But I still think that they overlook something in the dna that says that we just mingled.
    I can’t prove it, but I still see it looking at myself and the people around me.

  10. Alex
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 1:22 pm

    They are not extinct. I’ve met quite a few of them in my life.

  11. SenorMysterioso
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 1:24 pm

    They moved away when we moved in

  12. ted
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 5:56 pm

    They devolved into monkeys.

  13. Evil Merodach
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 6:38 pm

    75k years ago. While our skeletal fossils show no appreciable change, our toolkit changed, became more complex (Aurignacian), and we began to produce art and developed elaborate burial rituals. We also began spreading into Europe. This is when the slow demise of the Neanderthal began.

    We don’t know the nature of this change. Some suggest Homo Sapiens developed the ability to think symbolically, or perhaps our language abilities radically improved. We can only guess.

    Before this change the two species coexisted or seemed oblivious to each other. Afterwards, the Neanderthals’ world slowly compressed to a small part of the Iberian peninsula where their last stand took place. Near the end Homo Neanderthalis remains began showing some of the same characteristics as Homo Sapiens, a more modern toolkit and some artwork. It’s not known if these were trade goods or if they were also making the same leap Homo Sapiens had made — albeit too late to save them.

  14. Evil Merodach
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 6:42 pm

    Damn, the first part of my post was truncated. I was saying that Neanderthals and Anatomically Modern Humans coexisted for many thousands of years. That coexistence seemed to end when Homo Sapiens underwent some sort of change 40K-75K years ago.

  15. Evil Merodach
    Jul 30th, 2009 at 6:55 pm

    Oh, and there wasn’t a quick change in the environment as A.Mercer seems to suggest above.

    The environmental change (into a glaciated period) was over many thousands of years — not decades as we are seeing now. Climate change has always taken place over many thousands of years. What we’re seeing now is unprecedented.

  16. funnyads
    Jul 31st, 2009 at 12:19 am

    why isn’t the replacement/war theory believable..?

  17. Lasse
    Jul 31st, 2009 at 1:49 am

    After the Homo Sapiens infection started, the intergalactic council chose to evacuate them.

  18. Foreigner1
    Jul 31st, 2009 at 2:46 am

    Say Evil Merodach-
    If you say “The environmental change (into a glaciated period) was over many thousands of years — not decades as we are seeing now. Climate change has always taken place over many thousands of years. What we’re seeing now is unprecedented.” -What do you make of the rather quick changes that did happen in freezings? A man I’ve worked with in my own job has done some diggings on a few mammoths in Syberia that show all the signs of flash-freezing with food in their stomachs that stem from a moderate climate while those animals have frozen to death and got entombed in ice within a week.
    And such changes can be found all over the tundra and even in the fossil record all over the North Sea region.

    Theories of what caused these fast changes range from hightened global volcanic activity and changes in the magnetic flux of our planet to our complete solar system passing trough clouds of cosmic dust that blocked sunlight.

  19. Evil Merodach
    Jul 31st, 2009 at 10:29 am

    Foreigner1, the reports of frozen mammoths with well-preserved flesh are greatly exaggerated.
    There are only a handful of mammoth remains found with any flesh remaining. In all cases, the internal organs were rotted, or the body was partly eaten by scavengers, or both, BEFORE the animal became frozen. “The Berezovka mammoth, perhaps the most famous example, showed evidence of very slow decay and was putrefied to the point that the excavators found its stench unbearable.” (Weber 1980)

  20. Evil Merodach
    Jul 31st, 2009 at 10:34 am

    “Getting bogged down in a marsh, falling into “riparian” gullies, getting mired in sticky mudflows, falling through the thin ice of a lake, and getting caught in river bank cave-ins of river ice are some of the hazards mammoths would face. Judging by what they were eating, it appears that the time of death was usually late summer or early fall, precisely the time when melting and solifluction would have been at a maximum and travel most dangerous. Most of their remains are associated with river valleys and fluviatile and terrestrial sediment. There is no direct evidence that any mammoth simply froze to death.” (Farrand, 1961)

  21. Evil Merodach
    Jul 31st, 2009 at 5:48 pm

    Actually, I misspoke. The Younger Dryas was an example of rapid climate change. As the world’s climate was coming out of the last ice age, something happened (possibly the draining of giant Lake Agassiz into the North Atlantic) that reversed the warming trend in the northern hemisphere back into a glacial climate. The Younger Dryas took place 12,900–11,500 years ago. The change in temperature was not as abrupt as what we’re currently seeing with increases of 2-3°C in Alaska and Siberia just since the 1950s. The Younger Dryas was perhaps 10°C degrees cooler at its coldest.

  22. Dave
    Aug 2nd, 2009 at 3:20 pm

    They are still around, without a doubt. My sister married one.


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