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What happened to the Neanderthals?


Wired, Issue 15.02 - February 2007

They were our cousins, 
our hominid cousins. 

They looked like us, 
they walked like us, 
they may have even thought like us. 

So why did the Neanderthals disappear, 
while we Homo sapiens dug in and stayed?

Ever since 
the first Neanderthal bones 
were discovered 150 years ago 
in Germany’s Neander Valley, 
paleoanthropologists 
have sought to understand 
what could possibly 
have destroyed 
the once-thriving 
and widely dispersed species 
of prehistoric human. 

By most measures, 
the Neanderthals were 
the equal of our direct ancestors, 
the fully modern out-of-Africa characters 
often called Cro-Magnons, 
with whom the Neanderthals coexisted 
for thousands of years. 

Like our forebears, 
Neanderthals were supple sojourners, 
happily colonizing parts 
of Africa, Europe, and Asia. 

They stood upright, 
skillfully sculpted 
and wielded stone tools, 
and buried their dead 
with pomp and hope. 

They were slightly larger 
and more muscular 
than their Cro-Magnon counterparts, 
and their brains were bigger, too. 

Yet by about 30,000 years ago, 
the Neanderthals had vanished, 
leaving Cro-Magnons 
as the sole survivors 
of the tangled Hominina tribe. 

Moreover, while Neanderthals 
may well have been capable 
of interbreeding with Cro-Magnons, 
recent DNA analysis has revealed 
no signs that such Stone Age 
Capulet-Montague mergers occurred.

Some scientists have attributed 
the Neanderthals’ demise to chronic disease, 
pointing out that many Neanderthal skeletal 
remains show signs of arthritis 
and other bone disorders. 

Other people have wondered 
whether genocide was to blame. 

Perhaps the Cro-Magnons 
systematically exterminated 
their competitors, 
just as chimpanzees 
have been observed hunting down 
and killing every last member 
of a neighboring chimp troupe.

Another, more recent, hypothesis 
is that Homo sapiens outcompeted 
Homo neanderthalensis 
because of a difference 
in their economic systems. 

Reporting in the December issue 
of Current Anthropology, 
Steven Kuhn and Mary Stiner 
of the University of Arizona 
wrote that the archaeological record 
suggests all Neanderthals 
- male, female, adult, child - 
focused their efforts 
on “obtaining large terrestrial game.” 

In other words, they were all hunters. 

The Cro-Magnons, by contrast, 
appear to have divided labor 
along more or less sexual lines, 
with men doing most of the big-game killing, 
women and children gathering tubers 
and other plant foods, 
and everybody sharing 
the flesh and fruits of their efforts. 

By adopting this sort 
of specialization of labor, 
the researchers speculate, 
Homo sapiens likely proved 
more efficient and flexible 
than Neanderthals and were able 
to expand their population more rapidly.

In other words, 
at least according to this new theory 
put forward by Stiner and Kuhn, 
the Neanderthals 
weren’t felled by a pathogen 
or a primordial Slobodan Milosevic. 

They were done in 
by the bedrock family values 
of Fred and Wilma Flintstone. 

- Natalie Angier, 
Pulitzer Prize-winning 
author of The Canon

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