All jokes and off handed dismissals of all things scientific aside, this is an interesting article. Unfortunately the title is a bit misleading.
I’ve heard about the hypotheses before, it’s been around for a while – that Neanderthals living in what was earlier a very heavily wooded Southern Europe at the edges of the glaciers of the last great ice age, hunted prey up close and personal like using short spears and by thrusting them directly into their prey. This makes sense since throwing long spears in densely wooded areas would have resulted in more trees than animals being hit.
And the Neanderthals’ stockier, shorter limbed and more heavily muscled bodies made them suited for this type of hunting – and their bodies, unlike the Homo sapiens were not well suited for running long distances. And the Neanderthals were better suited for a much colder climate.
The early modern humans who developed in a warmer Africa with its open ranges, hunted by throwing spears at animals from farther distances and tracking and running down the wounded animals for the final kill, something that the taller more long limbed humans were well suited for.
When the ice age glaciers receded and modern humans migrated north into a warmer Europe, the new landscape further north gave the humans a distinct advantage in hunting over the Neanderthals and this adaptation might have also given us the advantage if there were conflicts between the two groups.
So in a nutshell (and an overly simplistic explanation), humans were better overhand throwers and runners making us better at hunting and surviving and better suited for modern sports like the javelin and baseball, football, golf etc. were as the poor Neanderthals would have gone hungry and died out and if they had survived would only have been better than us in sports like wresting :),
Trinkaus’ comments are the most important IMHO. :’)
This hypothesis relies on a computer simulation / reconstruction of Neandertals, claims Neandertals all died by a thrown spear (and there are lots of N remains) despite lack of evidence, also postulates that spear chuckin’ was practiced twenty thousand years earlier than first attested (despite no evidence thereto), and ignoring the evidence that Neandertal is ancestral to Europeans. :’)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/2131718/posts