Neanderthal Extinction Pieced Together

Jan. 27, 2004 — In a prehistoric battle for survival, Neanderthals had to compete against modern humans and were wiped off the face of the Earth, according to a new study on life in Europe from 60,000 to 25,000 years ago.

The findings, compiled by 30 scientists, were based on extensive data from sediment cores, archaeological artifacts such as fossils and tools, radiometric dating, and climate models. The collected information was part of a project known as Stage 3, which refers to the time period analyzed.

The number three also seems significant in terms of why the Neanderthals became extinct. One of the scientists involved in the research told Discovery News that a combination of three factors did the Neanderthals in.

"My general take on Neanderthal extinction was that they were in competition with anatomically modern humans at a time when there was increasing severe cold stress that was not only affecting them, but also the food resources they relied on," said Leslie Aiello, head of the University College London Graduate School, and an expert on Neanderthal response to weather.

Neanderthals appear to have tolerated temperatures as cold as zero degrees Fahrenheit, but during the last ice age, winter temperatures dipped to well below freezing. In order to cope, Neanderthals would have needed a lot more food than they were used to obtaining in winter.

"The costs of maintaining internal heat production at the required levels would have only been possible if Neanderthals were able to sustain a correspondingly high level of dietary energy intake," explained Aiello, adding that anatomically modern humans were better at dealing with the cold.

Early Homo sapiens, such as a group called the Gravettians that arose in Europe before the Neanderthals became extinct around 30,000 years ago, were loaded with the latest in prehistoric high tech.

They wore warm clothing made of fur and woven materials, lived in enclosed dwellings, and used effective weapons to ensnare animals and fish.

Paul Pettitt, a Neanderthal expert at the University of Sheffield who agrees with the new study findings, said, "(Gravettian) toolkits reveal a very sophisticated range of weaponry."

He said Neanderthals used spears that required close range contact with their prey, such as hyenas. Neanderthals probably thrust spears, like bayonets, into animals. Gravettians were better equipped.

"Far from general purpose spears deployed in the hand, we now see specialist projectile weapons (javelins) perhaps thrown with the aid of spearthrowers to increase effective range," Pettitt told Discovery News.

While some researchers theorize that Neanderthals also are related to humans, yet another study, published in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, claims that the skulls of Neanderthals and humans differ too much for Neanderthals to be our relatives.

Lead author Katerina Harvati of New York University said in a press release that we now have "the most concrete evidence to date that Neanderthals are indeed a separate species within the genus Homo."

Maybe it's just a pop' top' around here, and I don't think there's anything evil goin' on. I'm familiar with some racial superiority gonzos who think the Neandertal was really the ancestor of the "mud men" etc. I found another website this morning (which I will not name of course) that had a bunch of Neandertal stuff on it, including links to other Jew-hating sites, including at least one version of this story:

Taste for flesh troubled Neanderthals
by Dr Damian Carrington
BBC News Online
Monday, 12 June, 2000
The extinction of the Neanderthals could have been caused by their choosy appetites - they ate virtually nothing but meat... "They were picky eaters," says Dr Paul Pettitt, at the University of Oxford, UK. "And this tells me that they are really unchanging - doing the same old thing year after year... Neanderthals were excellent hunters," Dr Petitt told BBC News Online. "But the issue that was at stake was whether they hunted every day of their lives or whether it was just a summer outing." ...The early humans themselves may have been better hunters than the Neanderthals, depriving them of their kills. Or the hunted animals may have been struck by disease or migrated away.

Yeah, that's right! Neandertal WENT EXTINCT because he ate too much meat. Nothing political about that, eh?

What the Hominid Ate
by Kenneth Chang
Analyzing carbon atoms locked up in tooth enamel, two researchers challenge the widely held belief that Australopithecus africanus -- an upright, walking pre-human hominid that lived in southern Africa -- ate little more than fruits and leaves. Matt Sponheimer, an anthropology graduate student at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Julia Lee-Thorp of the University of Cape Town, South Africa, looked at four A. africanus fossil skeletons unearthed from South Africa. Living about 3 million years ago, A. africanus may be a direct ancestor of modern humans. A. africanus teeth were large and blunt with thick enamel, ideal for crushing nuts and chewing fruit as opposed to the sharp incisors one would want to rip into meat. The first stone tools, which would help in eating meat, didn't appear until about half a million years later. Sponheimer and Lee-Thorp took a new approach, looking at the chemical composition of the tooth enamel. After chipping about two milligrams of enamel with a diamond-tipped dental drill, the researchers analyzed the samples for the isotope carbon-13, which contains one extra neutron in the nucleus compared to the usual form of carbon. What Sponheimer and Lee-Thorp found was that the teeth of A. africanus had an in-between amount carbon-13 -- more than the fruit eaters, less than the grass eaters.

Hey, Henry Ford tried feeding his employees grass sandwiches. Maybe that was during his vegetarian fanatic phase, not unlike that of Paul and Linda who threatened to fire anyone working for their last tour who ate meat for the duration, or Ford's good friend and role model, Hitler.

Veggies Really Are Brain Food
Fire helped early humans evolve and become more intelligent not because it allowed them to barbecue meat, but because it allowed them to cook vegetables, researchers said on Tuesday. Learning how to cook probably also allowed humans to develop their unique monogamous society. Gregory Laden of the University of Minnesota, Richard Wrangham of Harvard University and colleagues noted that very early pre-humans, including the australopithecines such as "Lucy," had huge teeth and powerful jaws. By 1.9 million years ago, when Homo erectus appeared, teeth became smaller and jawbones less robust. Females got bigger—closer in size to males. Brains and bodies both grew. While some anthropologists argue it was because meat entered the diet, Laden and a team of anthropologists, nutritionists and primatologists said the changes occurred because the pre-humans had discovered fire and learned how to make roots and other vegetables easier to eat and more nutritious.

Laden and Wrangham wouldn't be vegetarians by any chance, would they?

Shift In Eating Habits Of Early Modern Humans
2 May 2001
Compared to Neanderthals living in inland Europe up to 100,000 years earlier, who relied primarily on land animals for their protein, early modern humans supplemented their diets with a significant amount of fish and waterfowl. The evidence has been outlined in a paper entitled 'Stable isotope evidence for increasing dietary breadth in the European mid-Upper Paleolithi', which is scheduled to appear in the May 22 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. Dr Michael Richards, of the Department of Archaeological Sciences, at the University of Bradford, said: "This new information highlights the differences in diets between Neanderthals and early modern humans and shows that modern humans were more flexible and adaptable in their dietary choices. This ability to adapt and use a range of resources could perhaps have given us, as a species, a competitive edge over the Neanderthals."
A Rumination on the Invention of Soup
March 1, 2002
It was a particularly tough and dangerous world back then. These hunter-gatherers were stuck in the last blast of the Wurm glaciation that killed off so much of their food and so many species. It was every man for himself as they ran fearfully from--and ran hungrily after--woolly mammoths, sabre-tooth tigers, wolves, and other hominids. And yet elderly Neanderthal skeletons have been found in France with teeth worn down below gum level--and deeply crippled skeletons have been found too. Implication: They could only have been kept alive through the compassion of their communities and the brilliance of some nouvelle cuisine chef who could find food alternatives to incredibly indigestible plants, meat tougher than my old aunt's shoes, and all of it cold. I try to put myself under the toque of that Stone Age Julia Child. I imagine him or her using bark to dip and carry water...putting food bits in it and noticing them soften or swell...marking how plants and berries, meat and marrow chunks would infuse the water with color and flavor. I imagine him or her getting the idea of warm broth from the 98.6 degree Fahrenheit mother's milk that kept little Neanderthal babies happy. That's when it hits me: Soup! It's an unbelievable achievement.

I guess Neandertal didn't invent bouillabaisse? ;')

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