Study: Modern Humans Killed Off Neanderthals Quickly

http://www.foxnews.com ^ | Saturday, February 25, 2006 | AP

[ThreePuttinDude]

LONDON — Neanderthals in Europe were killed off by the advance of modern humans thousands of years earlier than previously believed, losing a competition for food and shelter, according to a scientific study published Wednesday.

The research uses advances in radiocarbon dating to revise understanding of early humans, suggesting they colonized Europe more rapidly and coexisted for a much shorter period with genetic ancestors.

Paul Mellars, professor of prehistory and human evolution at the University of Cambridge and author of the study, said Neanderthals — the species of the Homo genus that lived in Europe and western Asia from around 230,000 years ago to around 29,000 years ago — succumbed much more readily to competition.

"The two sides were competing for the same territories, the same animals and fuel supplies and occupying the same cave spaces. With that kind of competition, the Neanderthals were always going to come out as the losers," said Mellars, whose paper was published in the journal Nature.

Modern humans — those anatomically the same as people today — were also better equipped to deal with a 6 degree Celsius (11 Fahrenheit) fall in temperatures around 40,000 years ago.

"Because they had better clothing, better technology(??) and a better mastery of fire, the humans were equipped to deal with it," Mellars said.

Mellars used the results of two recent studies of radiocarbon dating — a process of assessing age by counting radioactive decay of carbon in materials — to refine dates determined from fossils, bone fragments and other physical evidence that relates to the spread of humans.

[Nabber]

I'm just a little ahead of you, Robert.

I saw the movie at the theater when it first came out.

And I've stood right next to many, many 1.1 megaton nuclear weapons (although that was over 30 years ago).

Amazing that I had normal children, really.

[Delta Dawn]

The Neanderthals had exceeded their credit card limit and could no longer afford Black & Decker tools.

[Tunehead54]

Hard to believe this thread has gone to 190 posts without a Ping to Blam. (Or did I miss it?)

---

Nope. But he's usually the one posting the thread - I've given up trying to beat him to this type of thread. ;-)

On the other hand, the fact he's not here worries me a little ... He must be an 'ol fart by now ... ;-)

[Graymatter]

That reminds me, somewhere I read the theory that Neandertals couldn't give birth to Cro-Magnon babies because the babies' heads were too big and the N mothers' hips weren't built for the passage of big heads. The babies would have died, and/or the mothers; thus no evidence of interbreeding.
Now, that's probably been refuted---their hips aren't so narrow and babies' heads are soft for good reason (so to speak).
But just in case, there it is.

By the way, regardless of how the Neandertals met their waterloo, you have to wonder what would have been the shortcomings of a half-Cro-Magnon child among their kind. What was his (or her) fitness for Neandertal life? Did he seem so frail and sorry a creature, they'd have just pitched him?

The early question on this thread stands---why, how, did they ALL vanish? I'm baffled.

[robertpaulsen]

Ah. I thought maybe you hadn't, given your responses to my posts.

[ahayes]

I think your problem is with my statement that modern humans have a sex of aesthetics and don't usually go out of their way to have sex with butt ugly people. If I'm correct, what you're saying is that humans 30,000 years ago might not have had the same aesthetic, and might've loved ravishing Neanderthals.

I agree with you, and I don't think it's far-fetched at all to suppose the Neanderthals would be discriminated against based upon appearance. Mate selection based on all sorts of physical characteristics is widespread in the animal kingdom. Typically mate selection favors breeding with someone similar to one's own appearance, since creatures with a much different appearance may be of the wrong species, and breeding them would be a waste of time!

[VadeRetro]

As I recall, the Toba thing essentially triggered one of the Ice Ages. We see in sites in the Near East that at different times both Neanderthals and archaic sapiens species were present. The key is "different times." It looks like they actually had somewhat different ecological zones where the Neanderthals were more cold-adapted. So, when it got colder, everybody shifted south and then, when that passed, everybody shifted north.

You have to imagine that, if the sapiens group was being bottlenecked, the Neanderthals were feeling the pain somewhat too. But maybe not as much. In the study you linked, Neanderthals came out ahead of moderns in diversity.

So my bottom line is ... I don't know.

[Lurker]

yet they lived in a constantly predictable world, generation after generation.

That's a load of hooey.

L

[VadeRetro]

I think that any love is good lovin'
And so I took what I could get, mmm
Oooh, oooh, she looked at me with big brown eyes
And said

You ain't seen nothin' yet
B-B-B-Baby, you just ain't seen nothin' yet
Here's something that you never gonna forget
B-B-B-Baby, you just ain't seen nothin' yet

Bachman-Turner Overdrive

[Busywhiskers]

What kind of technology did they have back then??

Sticks.

Rocks

Planning commissions

[ahayes]

My position is that there was not much of this kind of protection going on, before people even understood that sex results in babies, and before people acquired scruples about sexual activity.

Why not? High-rank male chimpanzees control access to the females in the group, and they certainly don't understand paternity.

[JCEccles]

An example of ----dare I say the word????!!!-- EVOLUTION.

You're late to the party. Hitler and Stalin both embraced social darwinism of this nature. Indeed, one might say, "Better Volk through better genocide." Darwin's magical mechanism know as "survival of the fittest" may not be the trademark of genocidal maniacs, but they gave it its purest and most grisly expression.

Darwin. A prince of a man.

[Graymatter]

Another good site for the Toba catastrophe:

http://www.andaman.org/book/app-r/textr.htm

[Torie]

Thanks. An excellent link.

[Lovely-Day-For-A-Guinness]

Some rambling thoughts, rattling around in my warped mind....

The Neanderthal gets a bad rap as far as tool development goes. Basing his intelligence on this is like saying a Japanese handplane is inferior to a Western one for the fact that it's pulled instead of pushed. Both do the same thing, only in a different manner, although one (Western) is more efficient than the other.

No one would claim that Aborigines in Australia, 200 years ago, are inferior to Italians of the same era simply because the former would use 'primitive' instruments to make music and the latter would use stringed instruments. Or that one would use a stick to eat with while the other would use a knife and fork.

I believe that, due to the inability to communicate and move around like we do today, early man's solutions to problems arose independently, and in many cases one solution was more efficient than another. It's probably because of this that one 'tribe', subspecies, clan, call it what you will, was able to wipe-out or assimilate another. It's this natural evolution of intelligence that got us here today where we now can communicate without seeing or knowing each other.

And, as for differenciating species and subspecies by skulls and skeletons, a chihuahua's skeleton looks markedly different than a Irish wolfhound's, but both are dogs. A Pygmy's stature is shorter than a Northern European's (except the French), yet they're all human. The same variability that we see in humans today surely had to exist tens of thousand years ago.

I think we come into this debate with too much baggage that weighs our thoughts/beliefs heavily, and that our modern experiences cloud any objectivity we might have about what did or didn't happen long ago.

But what do I know? I'm still a fan of George "The Animal" Steele.

[Graymatter]

>>High-rank male chimpanzees control access to the females in the group, and they certainly don't understand paternity.

That's different. It's within the group, it's a social thing. Not consciously practiced for the protection of the bloodlines. Not to make sure they have good healthy offspring.
You need some kind of a system, else the young fellows are going to bash their elders' heads in, and that's bad for business.
Besides, any comparison to animals is going to miss the mark, because even the Neandertals were sentient beings with conscious motives.
At least---I think so!

[SandwicheGuy]

I don't know what happened, but it seems the simplest answer is that the two became one, by interbreeding.

Occam's Razor says that you are more likely to be correct in that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. This flies in the face of some creditable, although not conclusive, studies so I am inclined to think that some of my fellow men, and Helen the Doyen of the WH press corps, have more Neanderthal in them then others.

[SandwicheGuy]

Moreover, even primitive peoples have a sense of aesthetic, and by any sense of human aesthetics I'm aware of Neanderthals must've been butt ugly.

Helen Thomas isn't? Game, set and match.

[SandwicheGuy]

The simplest answer is that they killed the Neanderthals. That is what humans typically do to predecessor occupants of territory they conquer.

All jesting aside, this is probably what happended. The most recent example in our history is the way we treated the Red Man. And this from a society with books... Go back further to Genghis Khan and others for an example of unrestriced warfare and the clash of societies.

[Texas Eagle]

"Neanderthals are sooooooo stupid."