Posted on 05/15/2012 11:00:12 AM PDT by Theoria
Over 20,000 years ago, humans won the evolutionary battle against Neanderthals. They may have had some assistance in that from their best friends.
One of the most compelling -- and enduring -- mysteries in archaeology concerns the rise of early humans and the decline of Neanderthals. For about 250,000 years, Neanderthals lived and evolved, quite successfully, in the area that is now Europe. Somewhere between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago, early humans came along.
They proliferated in their new environment, their population increasing tenfold in the 10,000 years after they arrived; Neanderthals declined and finally died away.
What happened? What went so wrong for the Neanderthals -- and what went so right for us humans?
The cause, some theories go, may have been environmental, with Neanderthals' decline a byproduct of -- yikes -- climate change. It may have been social as humans developed the ability to cooperate and avail themselves of the evolutionary benefits of social cohesion. It may have been technological, with humans simply developing more advanced tools and hunting weapons that allowed them to snare food while their less-skilled counterparts starved away.
The Cambridge researchers Paul Mellars and Jennifer French have another theory, though. In a paper in the journal Science, they concluded that "numerical supremacy alone may have been a critical factor" in human dominance -- with humans simply crowding out the Neanderthals. Now, with an analysis in American Scientist, the anthropologist Pat Shipman is building on their work. After analyzing the Mellars and French paper and comparing it with the extant literature, Shipman has come to an intriguing conclusion: that humans' comparative evolutionary fitness owes itself to the domestication of dogs.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Yet another reason to choose dogs over cats.
The article refers to the first arrival of humans in Europe, "Somewhere between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago".
After many decades of scientific debate, and several hypotheses, the "consensus" these days is that humans evolved in eastern Africa, and that "Mitochondrial Eve" and "Y-chromosome Adam" lived there between 142,000 and 200,000 years ago.
As to the "what" humans came from, we evolved from non-human hominids, of whom remains from dozens of species or sub-species have been identified.
So, which of those were, or were not, our ancestors? That's hard to say.
However, the DNA evidence we have from Neanderthals suggests that guys then were as horny as today, and would pretty much mate with anyone who'd let them... ;-)
And that suggests multiple-choice answer D: "all of the above."
Thanks for the cool info.
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