Summit County Citizens Voice

A Neanderthal skull from an archaeological site at La Chapelle-aux-Saints. PHOTO FROM WIKIPEDIA VIA THE CREATIVE COMMONS.

Cambridge researchers say they were simply outnumbered by modern Homo sapiens moving north from Africa

By Summit Voice

SUMMIT COUNTY — After puzzling over the disappearance of European Neanderthals for decades, researchers at Cambridge University say they’ve discovered why they were displaced about 40,000 years ago.

The answer, it turns out, isn’t all that complicated. The Neanderthals simply were outnumbered by modern humans arriving from Africa, who simply swarmed the region with more than 10 times the populations of the Neanderthal inhabitants.

The archaeological evidence strongly suggests that the incoming modern groups possessed superior hunting technologies and equipment like more effective and long-range hunting spears, and probably more efficient procedures for processing and storing food supplies over the prolonged and exceptionally cold glacial winters. They also appear to have had more wide-ranging social contacts with adjacent human groups to allow for trade and exchange of essential food supplies in times of food scarcity.

“In any event, it was clearly this range of new technological and behavioral innovations which allowed the modern human populations to invade and survive in much larger population numbers than those of the preceding Neanderthals across the whole of the European continent,” said Professor Sir Paul Mellars, Professor Emeritus of Prehistory and Human Evolution at the Department of Archaeology.

“Faced with this kind of competition, the Neanderthals seem to have retreated initially into more marginal and less attractive regions of the continent and eventually – within a space of at most a few thousand years – for their populations to have declined to extinction – perhaps accelerated further by sudden climatic deterioration across the continent around 40,000 years ago.”

The reasons for the relatively sudden disappearance of the European Neanderthal populations across the continent around 40,000 years ago has for long remained one of the great mysteries of human evolution. After 300 millennia of living, and evidently flourishing, in the cold, sub–glacial environments of central and western Europe, they were rapidly replaced over all areas of the continent by new, anatomically and genetically ‘modern’ populations who originated and evolved in the vastly different tropical environments of Africa.

Mellars and PhD student Jennifer French conducted a detailed statistical analysis of the archaeological evidence from the classic ‘Perigord’ region of southwestern France, which contains the largest concentration of Neanderthal and early modern human sites in Europe.

They found clear evidence that the earliest modern human populations penetrated the region in at least ten times larger numbers than those of the local Neanderthal populations already established in the same regions, including a sharp increase in the total number of occupied sites, much higher densities of artifacts and food remains and bigger areas of occupation in the sites, revealing the formation of much larger and apparently more socially integrated social groupings.

Faced with this dramatic increase in the incoming modern human population, the capacity of the local Neanderthal groups to compete for the same range of living sites and food — principally reindeer, horse, bison and red deer — and the same scarce fuel supplies to tide the groups over the extremely harsh glacial winters, would have been massively undermined.

Additionally, almost inevitably, repeated conflicts or confrontations between the two populations would arise for occupation of the most attractive locations and richest food supplies, in which the increased numbers and more highly coordinated activities of the modern human groups would ensure their success over the Neanderthal groups.

Whether the incoming modern human groups also possessed more highly developed brains and associated mental capacities than the Neanderthals remains at present a matter of intense debate. But the sudden appearance of a wide range of complex and sophisticated art forms (including cave paintings), the large-scale production of elaborate decorative items (such as perforated stone and ivory beads, and imported sea shells), and clearly ‘symbolic’ systems of markings on bone and ivory tools – all entirely lacking among the preceding Neanderthals – strongly point to more elaborate systems of social communications among the modern groups, probably accompanied by more advanced and complex forms of language.

All of these new and more complex behavioural patterns can be shown to have developed first among the ancestral African Homo sapiens populations, at least 20,0000 to 30,000 years before their dispersal from Africa, and progressive colonisation (and replacement of earlier populations) across all regions of Europe and Asia from around 60,000 years onwards.

If, as the latest genetic evidence strongly suggests, the African Homo sapiens and European Neanderthal populations had been evolving separately for at least half a million years, then the emergence of some significant contrasts in the mental capacities of the two lineages would not be a particularly surprising development, in evolutionary terms.

Whatever the precise cultural, behavioral and intellectual contrasts between the Neanderthals and intrusive modern human populations, this new study published in Science demonstrates for the first time the massive numerical supremacy of the earliest modern human populations in western Europe, compared with those of the preceding Neanderthals, and thereby largely resolves one of the most controversial and long-running debates over the rapid decline and extinction of the enigmatic Neanderthal populations.

Filed under: Archaeology Tagged: | archaeology, early humans, Homo sapiens, Neanderthals