[dohboi]

Yeah, as this article notes, competition with humans was almost certainly also a factor. But a major volcanic eruption and the ensuing climate chaos can wreak havoc on a population, especially one already under pressure.

The two explanations are not necessarily in some kind of competition.

Thanks for the link, though. Looks like a cool article.

[KaiserJeep]

Doubtless those Neanderthals had an unwise taste for SUVs as personal transport....and burned too many Fossil Fuels.

[dohboi]

KJ, thanks for reminding us of the fatal flaw with this study--clearly the Neanderthals were never completely wiped out...you are clear evidence that at least one remains with us today!!!

[jedrider]

My aunt must have been a Neanderdal descendant: she could clean a carcass down to bone chips.

[vtsnowedin]

My aunt must have been a Neanderdal descendant: she could clean a carcass down to bone chips.

Ever watch someone that grew up in one of the worlds slums eat a piece of fried chicken? Waste not ,want not.

[dohboi]

Note, vt, that even the author of the study in your link says: "I wouldn't say climate had absolutely nothing to do with it."

[rdberg1957]

Climate change is nothing new. It has had impact on all life for millions of years. What is new (relatively speaking) is the acceleration of climate change by putting gasoline on the fire.

[vtsnowedin]

Note, vt, that even the author of the study in your link says: "I wouldn't say climate had absolutely nothing to do with it."

Yes noted. My skepticism is with the reach of the conclusions derived from such meager evidence all of which can have a much different meaning.
In my well read but not expert opinion the most likely causes (and it was probably a combination of things) of the Neanderthals demise was the retreating ice sheets reduced the food source for their main hunting prey and made hunting more difficult. Then the modern humans moved in with their dogs and began to compete with them. this probably included actively hunting the neanderthals , killing and eating them at ,least during Donner party conditions.
The modern humans may well have introduced diseases that were plagues to the neanderthals making one contact with a modern human fatal for a whole Neanderthal family group or tribe.
At any rate some thing or things happened to make their death rate exceed their birth rate and in a few generations they were gone.

[dissident]

The problem with this theory is that Europe was not the origin point of the Neanderthals or any other hominid. If they were so sensitive to winter then why did they migrate north? Was Africa and Asia Minor devoid of food during the last glacial maximum? All this study reveals is that local populations can experience famines. Gee whiz, who woulda known? As if Homo Sapiens groups never underwent famines in any region they settled.

This study is trying to latch onto climate change to compensate for its utter uselessness. It cannot possibly exclude the influence of the main competitor hominid on the food supply of the Neanderthals. And yes, harsh winters and cold summers would have aggravated this competition. Those winter conditions would have been frequent over the time span of tens of thousands of years. The Neanderthals had enough IQ capacity to migrate away to greener pastures. What stopped them?

Also, classifying the glaciation cycle of the last 3.3 million years as "climate change" is BS. It was the normal stable climate regime even it had an ice sheep and CO2 cycle. Climate change is associated with persistent trends such as we currently have with CO2 and not with constrained oscillations. Climate change brought us into the ice age of the last 3.3 million years and climate change has taken us out it as we are over 400 ppmv of CO2 and headed for over 600 ppmv regardless of what we do in the future. It will take hundreds of thousands of years to get back down to 300 ppmv.

[Synapsid]

dissident,

"...Europe was not the origin point of Neanderthals or any other hominid."

That's still being worked out. A recent paper presenting nuclear-DNA work on bones of hominids in the Sima de los Huesos, a cave in the Atapuerca range of northern Spain, shows relationship to the later Neanderthals, and the Atapuerca hominids have been dated to 430 000 years ago which is about 200 000 years before early Neanderthal remains. Work published two years ago on cranial remains from the same site showed shared characteristics with Neanderthals but genomic evidence is less subjective in nature than cranial so it's a firmer basis for interpretation. I believe the Atapuerca hominids have been assigned to Homo antecessor by the people working on the remains; I don't know if that's widely accepted yet. There are stone tools in England as old as about 900 000 years, if memory serves, but I don't think there's any skeletal material so there's no clear link to the much later Atapuerca hominids.

I know of no Neanderthal remains at all from Africa.

The Neanderthals ranged from Great Britain to Uzbekistan in Central Asia and survived the previous glacial but one, and most of the most recent one, but recent work indicates that they were extinct throughout their range (as far as I've seen) by about 40 000 years ago, some 20 000 years before the Last Glacial Maximum as it's called. Modern humans were in Europe by some
43 000 years ago, and I think in the 40 000-year range in Asia as well, so climate plus competition is likely to be at least part of the story of the end of the Neanderthals. Moderns with ancestry that postdates the spread out of Africa carry some Neanderthal DNA but not as much as the earliest Moderns in Europe had--it seems that it's been being selected against over time.

[rockdoc123]

Also, classifying the glaciation cycle of the last 3.3 million years as "climate change" is BS. It was the normal stable climate regime even it had an ice sheep and CO2 cycle. Climate change is associated with persistent trends such as we currently have with CO2 and not with constrained oscillations. Climate change brought us into the ice age of the last 3.3 million years and climate change has taken us out it as we are over 400 ppmv of CO2 and headed for over 600 ppmv regardless of what we do in the future. It will take hundreds of thousands of years to get back down to 300 ppmv.

the definitions for climate change disagree with this

from Nasa

"Climate change" refers to any long-term change in Earth's climate, or in the climate of a region or city. This includes warming, cooling and changes besides temperature

from IPCC

Climate change – in the most general sense- encompasses all forms of climatic inconstancy (that is, any differences between the “long-term” statistics of the meteorological elements calculated for different periods but relating to the same area), regardless of their statistical nature or physical cause.

from Wikipedia

Climate change is a change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns when that change lasts for an extended period of time (i.e., decades to millions of years). Climate change may refer to a change in average weather conditions, or in the time variation of weather around longer-term average conditions (i.e., more or fewer extreme weather events). Climate change is caused by factors such as biotic processes, variations in solar radiation received by Earth, plate tectonics, and volcanic eruptions. Certain human activities have also been identified as significant causes of recent climate change, often referred to as global warming.[1]

these definitions have nothing to do with long term oscillations (i.e. Milankovitch cycles) but simply refer to any long term change, whether it has happened previously or not. Hence the change from a glacial dominated climate to a inter-glacial climate would be climate change. The term is not synonymous with AGW, although some seem to want it to be so.

[Sixstrings]

The problem with this theory is that Europe was not the origin point of the Neanderthals or any other hominid. If they were so sensitive to winter then why did they migrate north? Was Africa and Asia Minor devoid of food during the last glacial maximum?

Neanderthals came from an evolutionary line that evolved in Eurasia:

The first humans with proto-Neanderthal traits are believed to have existed in Eurasia as early as 350,000–600,000 years ago with the first "true Neanderthals" appearing between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal

They never "migrated north" to start with -- they EVOLVED in the north. Their evolutionary ANCESTORS (and ours) came from Africa.

I forget the name of it, but there was that one first species that crossed the sinai to break out of the Africa bottleneck.

That species then branched out to a few different lines. One branch leading to Neanderthal, and another to homo sapiens.

Homo Sapiens was all over Africa and everywhere else too, but Neanderthal never was in Africa. Neanderthal's range:



I suppose your question could be phrased as, "why didn't they migrate south?" Answer: homo sapiens was already in Africa. Out-competing neanderthal in Europe already, so further south was no good option.

Neanderthal went "extinct" for several reasons:

* Climate change and ice age.. it took a lot of species out, including the sabre tooth cats and wooly mammoth. And, neanderthal.

* Neanderthal was actually better suited for the north, in some ways, compared to homo sapiens. Greater lung capacity, stouter and much stronger, etc. BUT.. homo sapiens was *much smarter*, and had full language, which was a great advantage over neanderthal's simpler vocalizations.

Neanderthal was stronger physically and sturdier, but intelligence and communication and technology is the greatest of all advantages.

* More recent studies indicate that homo sapiens out-competed neanderthal, fought them and drove them out of lands, but also interbred with them.

Neanderthal didn't really go extinct -- rather, they were bred out and blended in with us, and we carry some of their genes to this day.

[GHung]

Week beginning on May 8, 2016: 407.84 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 403.83 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 385.12 ppm



Burn it, baby..... Burn it all!

[dohboi]

On review, I have to agree with vt and dis that the core finding of the original study that the lead article refers to is rather self evident.

But, hey, it prompted some pretty interesting discussion.

Thanks, all, for that!

I find myself in the unusual position of agreeing with ROCK on something regarding climate!

Anthropogenic, GHG-triggered Global Warming happens to be the main driver (by far) of the current dramatic shift in climate, aka Climate Change, that we are undergoing. But global changes in climate prompted by other other forcings, such as Milankovitch cycles, surely must also be termed Climate Change.

But perhaps I'm missing something?

Dis, in your studies, do you really find that scholars reserve the term Climate Change for truly macro-level shifts, like the shift some millions of years ago into the current cycle of ice ages/glaciations? Could you point us in some direction that would make that usage clear?

6S wrote: "...there was that one first species that crossed the sinai to break out of the Africa bottleneck.

That species then branched out to a few different lines. One branch leading to Neanderthal, and another to homo sapiens."

That seems to be misleading, at best, at least as far as what the preponderance of evidence suggests:

...modern humans [homo sapiens] evolved relatively recently in Africa, migrated into Eurasia and replaced all populations [such as Neanderthal] which had descended from Homo erectus

http://www.actionbioscience.org/evolution/johanson.html

But yes, there was some interbreeding, but not very much--maybe 50-80 individual occurrences of cross sub-species mating would account for the level of Neanderthal DNA in modern populations today, apparently.

vt wrote: "The modern humans may well have introduced diseases that were plagues to the neanderthals making one contact with a modern human fatal for a whole Neanderthal family group or tribe.
At any rate some thing or things happened to make their death rate exceed their birth rate and in a few generations they were gone."

That's an interesting proposal that I hadn't thought about. It would seem quite logical, since a similar dynamic was important in wiping out so much of the Native American population (Guns, Germs, and Steel and all that).

The problem with it that I see, though, is that one then (and to some extent the problem with any theory that ascribes the demise of the Neanderthal solely to the influence of homo sapiens) is that the two populations seem to have co-existed in Europe for about 5000 years.

Surely, an introduced disease would do most of its grim work in the first and second generation after contact. I can't quite figure out a scenario where it would take hundreds of generations to do so.

Also, if homo sapiens were so much more effective at hunting because of their domestication of dogs, their throwing weapons and their communicative abilities, one would think that those advantages also would have out-competed Neanderthals much more quickly and wiped them out in much faster than 5000 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_extinction

[dohboi]

I hadn't heard before that Western Europe Neanderthals went through a near-extinction experience, or bottleneck, do to climate shifting to a much more severely cold phase, but long before modern humans came on the scene:

...Western European Neanderthals went through a demographic crisis, a population bottleneck that severely reduced their numbers, leaving Western Europe largely empty of humans for a period of time. The demographic crisis seems to coincide with a period of extreme cold in Western Europe. Subsequently, this region was repopulated by a small group of individuals from a surrounding area. The geographic origin of this source population is not clear, but it may be possible to pinpoint it further with additional study.

"The fact that Neanderthals in Western Europe were nearly extinct, but then recovered long before they came into contact with modern humans came as a complete surprise to us," said Dalén, associate professor at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. "This indicates that the Neanderthals may have been more sensitive to the dramatic climate changes that took place in the last Ice Age than was previously thought."


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-02-neandertha ... d.html#jCp

[Sixstrings]

6S wrote: "...there was that one first species that crossed the sinai to break out of the Africa bottleneck.

That species then branched out to a few different lines. One branch leading to Neanderthal, and another to homo sapiens."

That seems to be misleading, at best, at least as far as what the preponderance of evidence suggests:

...modern humans [homo sapiens] evolved relatively recently in Africa, migrated into Eurasia and replaced all populations [such as Neanderthal] which had descended from Homo erectus

Well maybe I'm unclear about it, but didn't homo erectus fisrt evolve in Africa?

My understanding was the first bipedal humans evolved in Africa, then they crossed the Sinai. Homo sapiens spread out the most.. but neanderthal was never in Africa, that evolved from an ancestor common to us, which must have left Africa first?

[Synapsid]

dohboi, Sixstrings,

Bipedality is the basic hominin (correct term technically but I prefer the older "hominid") adaptation and appears in the fossil record well over three million years ago. The earliest hominid remains outside Africa are found in Georgia south of the Caucasus and date to just shy of 2 million years ago, and are assigned to Homo erectus/Homo ergaster or given their own species georgicus. Erectines subsequently spread from NW Europe to SE Asia and lasted for close to 2 million years, evidently doing something right.

The view that has been held for decades is that a later African form, Homo heidelbergensis, left Africa by half a million or so years ago and gave rise to the Neanderthals in Europe and, later, to Homo sapiens (often called Moderns) in Africa. Moderns had reached Israel (the Qafzeh and Skhul individuals) by sometime in the last interglacial, 90 000 to 120 000 years ago; they may have survived in the Arabian Peninsula, according to recent work but otherwise it was later expansion from NE Africa that led to Moderns spreading out of Africa. Lots of ongoing research on the topic.

The Atapuerca hominids (dated to 430 000 years ago) that I mentioned in my previous post don't fit the view above, as we have no evidence of them outside Europe that I know of but they seem to belong to a good candidate for Neanderthal ancestor. Ongoing research etc. We also have genomic evidence from Central Asia of a form called Denisovan that is closer to Neanderthal than to us and that donated DNA to some Moderns in, I believe, New Guinea and Melanesia in general and also in Australia. There is also genomic evidence interpreted as input from an archaic (non-Modern) form in Africa, in peoples that did not leave that continent.

We have a more complex history than had been thought, we are finding out.

By the way, there's no evidence that Neanderthal speech was any less complex than ours; we just don't know. We do know that their average brain size was comparable to ours or larger, which is consistent with their being more massive, although shorter, than we are, but brain size is no necessary guide to intelligence. They disappeared some 20 000 years before the Last Glacial Maximum (most of the large mammals such as sabre-tooths and wooly mammoths went extinct well after it) though they had survived the very harsh previous glacial, so it does look like our own ancestors were an additional stressor that tipped the balance somehow, though I know of no evidence for actual conflict.

[dohboi]

Thanks for the clarifications, Syn. As you pointed out (and what I wanted to correct about 6S's self-admittedly unclear statements) was that the exodus from Africa of the ancestors of the Neanderthals FAR predated the exodus of the 'modern humans' or homo sapiens--like by probably hundreds of thousands of years.

On the language thing, we do, actually, have some evidence of what some features of Neanderthal speech must have been.

They, like all other mammals besides modern humans, were 'obligate nose breathers'--they had a direct connection between their nasal passage and their lungs, so that they could drink, eat, swallow, etc, without ever having to stop breathing.

This means that all of their vowel and most consonant sounds (unless they had things like clicks) would have been heavily nasalized. This lowers the hearers ability to distinguish different sounds, so would have been an impediment to effective elaborated communication, especially compared to homo sapiens abilities at the time. We can infer this from how the skeleton is structured.

Similarly, we can determine that they only had one 'resonating cavity'--essentially, they didn't have much of any pharynx. That means that they could not have created the clear resonant frequency differences that help us distinguish vowels--they probably had only one or maybe two vowels.

Some scholars have suggested that this means their words and sentences would have to have been so long (to come up with distinctive word shapes from such a poor stock), that they would have forgotten the beginning by the time they got to the end.

I am dubious of this particular claim--maybe that's what they had bigger brains for. But it certainly looks as if, whatever linguistic system they might have had, it probably wasn't as easy either to articulate distinct sounds nor to perceive those crucial sound distinctions so vital in the construction of every known modern human language.

(Sorry if this got a bit technical--we are wandering into areas that abut my once-upon-a-time academic field. But I'm not up on the latest, so further research may well have overturned some or all of what I have laid out above. I'll to a bit of digging to see if anything interesting pops up.)

Here's a link to a old seminal paper on the topic: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4177625?se ... b_contents

ETA: Ah, I see that perhaps newer research may be undermining some of this earlier work. I recall that Lieberman (the author of the above-cite work) made quite a bit out of the different shape of the hyoid bone of Neanderthals versus modern humans. But this article claims that we have now discovered at least some Neanderthal skeletons that have modern-looking hyoid bones. So who knows... Note though that they say: "We were very careful not to suggest that we had proven anything beyond doubt"

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-25465102

I'm still not sure about how they get around the missing pharynx and the obligate nose breathing stuff.

ETA again: I kinda like this guy's theory, not the lease because of the cool and fitting acronym: "Steven Mithen (2006) speculates that the Neanderthals may have had an elaborate proto-linguistic system of communication that was more musical than modern human language, and that pre-dated the separation of language and music into two separate modes of cognition. He called this hypothetical lingual system 'hmmmmm' because it would be Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and mimetic"

[Synapsid]

dohboi,

Last I saw, Neanderthal hyoids were just like ours; I believe those of pigs are very similar too, so the hyoid might not be especially useful for telling us about sound articulation.

As to the pharynx, I doubt very much that our cousins were made any differently there than we are but I know nothing about the skeletal evidence for a missing pharynx so I can't know that. Since we're the only hominid we have to study functionally I'm not inclined to regard statements of the sort "This could not have done that" as convincing. Myself, I suspect the Neanderthals were as intellectually capable as we are but thinking differently in some ways, because we do see differences from us in the ways they lived. As we learn more and more about them, though, we see some of the differences falling away that were thought to be there, such as ornamentation (long thought to be confined to Moderns but now known not to be) and technical capabilities. As an example of the latter, the Chatelperronian tool industry of SW (?) France has long been viewed as an example of Neanderthal borrowing from the more advanced Moderns since it shows advanced tool types known only from Modern sites, not from those of the Neanderthals. One result, however, of the extensive effort to re-date important sites with new or improved methods of dating has been the demonstration that the Chatelperronian predates any evidence of Moderns in Europe. It has for too long been the custom to interpret Neanderthal remains and artefacts in the context of Neanderthals being less than us.

I haven't read Steve Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals yet. Mithen is one of the clearest-thinking archaeologists in the business in my opinion, and he's an excellent writer, so the book is certainly worth the look. It's been on my list for an embarrassingly long time but I have been looking forward to reading it. Thanks for bringing it up. You might like two of his other books: After the Ice, and Thirst.

What was your once-upon-a-time academic field?