What happened to the Neanderthals?

Wired, Issue 15.02 - February 2007

http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/15.02/bigquestions.html?pg=3&topic=bigquestions&topic_set=

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