From the Geological Society of America: Boulder, Colo., USA – The Campanian Ignimbrite (CI) eruption in Italy 40,000 years ago was one of the largest volcanic cataclysms in Europe and injected a significant amount of sulfur-dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere. Scientists have long debated whether this eruption contributed to the final extinction of the Neanderthals. This new study by Benjamin A. Black and colleagues tests this hypothesis with a sophisticated climate model.
Black and colleagues write that the CI eruption approximately coincided with the final decline of Neanderthals as well as with dramatic territorial and cultural advances among anatomically modern humans. Because of this, the roles of climate, hominin competition, and volcanic sulfur cooling and acid deposition have been vigorously debated as causes of Neanderthal extinction.
They point out, however, that the decline of Neanderthals in Europe began well before the CI eruption: “Radiocarbon dating has shown that at the time of the CI eruption, anatomically modern humans had already arrived in Europe, and the range of Neanderthals had steadily diminished. Work at five sites in the Mediterranean indicates that anatomically modern humans were established in these locations by then as well.”
“While the precise implications of the CI eruption for cultures and livelihoods are best understood in the context of archaeological data sets,” write Black and colleagues, the results of their study quantitatively describe the magnitude and distribution of the volcanic cooling and acid deposition that ancient hominin communities experienced coincident with the final decline of the Neanderthals.
In their climate simulations, Black and colleagues found that the largest temperature decreases after the eruption occurred in Eastern Europe and Asia and sidestepped the areas where the final Neanderthal populations were living (Western Europe). Therefore, the authors conclude that the eruption was probably insufficient to trigger Neanderthal extinction.
However, the abrupt cold spell that followed the eruption would still have significantly impacted day-to-day life for Neanderthals and early humans in Europe. Black and colleagues point out that temperatures in Western Europe would have decreased by an average of 2 to 4 degrees Celsius during the year following the eruption. These unusual conditions, they write, may have directly influenced survival and day-to-day life for Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans alike, and emphasize the resilience of anatomically modern humans in the face of abrupt and adverse changes in the environment.
FEATURED ARTICLE
Campanian Ignimbrite volcanism, climate, and the final decline of the Neanderthals
Benjamin A. Black et al., University of California, Berkeley, California, USA. Published online ahead of print on 19 March 2015; http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/G36514.1.
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Baloney. Eurasian Neanderthals were wiped out by African colonial genocide.
But only after the Africans had lived in the Middle East for a very long time before invading Europe and East Asia. The Aurignacian shows up in the Zagros Mountains at least 50 ka. Fishing gear of Upper Paleolithic aspect has been tentatively dated to 70 ka in Sub-Saharan Africa.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15540464
From Italy and the UK teeth and jaw bone of modern humans dated between 41 and 45,000 years ago.
Neanderthal shagged out of existence????????
Neanderthals were both shagged and bagged out of existence as a separate group. The AMH invaders made both love with and war on the natives. But it wouldn’t have taken much of either to do the trick. Simply outcompeting the locals for resources could account for the demise of the Neanderthals and rise of the Moderns. That and higher population density.
If their interactions were like what has happened in recorded history and archaeology, Neanderthal males would have been killed and their women captured, which would almost have to voluntary, since a Neanderthal female would probably be stronger than the huskiest Modern male. Maybe they used nets or dead fall traps.
Of course Neanderthals ate each other, especially the fat-rich brains, so the Moderns might have chowed down on the Neanderthals, too.
I have this mental picture of Neanderthal being the late George Foreman, and Early Modern being an under 21 rising star of the gloves. I dont think that systematic killing by one of the other is a viable explanation. Especially as the supposed loser seems far better suited to combative environments than the winner ? Superior organisational skills are not going to be a force multiplier, as the cultural evidence seems to suggest both were evenly matched in that regard ? Plus one needs to consider again and always, the pitifully small numbers involved in any interface. More likely some ailment carried by one, but deadly to the other, something like those old stories about Indian tribes being wiped out by the common cold ?
The moderns did have superior organizational skills, and probably numbers.
But accidental germ warfare can’t be ruled out.
Indians didn’t succumb to the common cold, but smallpox virus couldn’t have helped their chances to resist the invaders.
One of the thoughts is the location of where the Neanderthals lived in comparison to modern humans at the time in general made them much more susceptible to any radiation increases that might have occurred due to a reduced earth magnetic field.
But moderns were already occupying the same latitudes as Neanderthals when the latter died out. For prior periods, you’re right, but they survived those.
I wonder how this rates compared to the TOBA eruption 70,000 years ago. While not conclusive, the genetic studies show that all of humanity was reduced to between 2,000 and 20,000 breeding individuals at that time and it coincides with a massive SO2 deposit record in the ice cores taken from all over the southern hemisphere (not so much the northern, because the TOBA was in Sumatra.
The Toba eruption probably wiped out most of the humans [H. erectus] in southeast Asia [apart from the hobbits of Flores] as it was full to capacity, from a hunting and gathering perspective, and had been for around 2 million years.
Toba removed the competition and modern humans moved in to take over the neighbourhood,
Toba was over an order of magnitude more powerful than Campi Flegrei. It’s the biggest volcanic event known from the Quaternary, with the unlikely but possible exception of Yellowstone’s Island Park Caldera.
OK, they found some really old bones in Africa, does that mean that we are all “out-of-Africa?”, is the science settled?
It’s not settled. There are still holdouts who think that modern groups evolved in place on other continents with gene flow among them. But with each passing year the evidence mounts that all humans, ancient, modern and in between, originated in Africa, leaving the homeland in waves starting over 1.3 ma. There are however some minor differences among modern groups that derive from the extinct subspecies, Neanderthals and Denisovans.
Sturgis – agreed.
The science on human evolution most certainly is not settled.
Whilst out of Africa is – generically – probably [I Think >95%] correct – we do not know which species (or sub-species) gave rise to Homo sapiens (sapiens) {If, like some, you consider neanderthalis a separate species; and heidelbergis and georgicus . . . . .}.
But – agreed? No.
Certainly not, at this stage . . . .
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I most certainly do not consider Neanderthals a separate species. They were a subspecies of H. sapiens quite close to us, ie H. sapiens sapiens, but with important differences.
On the bases of anatomy and behavior, it seems likely to me that H. heidelbergensis was the ancestor of both the (originally) sub-Saharan African subspecies H. s. sapiens and the more northerly and intercontinental H. s. neanderthalensis.
Okay, Chief, let me see if I’ve got this right . . . we still don’t know what happened to the Neanderthals.
Sturgis – it’s obvious that you have studied the “early man” discoveries in depth. Thank you for sharing your expertise with us.
By any chance did you have a chat with Jean Auel while she was writing?
After she wrote, yes, but not during or before.
She writes fiction, so it might not really matter, but she got a lot wrong even in the state of what was supportable thirty years ago. She freely admits to making a bunch of stuff up, and why not? Who knows?
You’re welcome.
This has been a favorite area of debate for me for a very long time. This eruption would have happened just as modern humans were migrating into the area. More importantly than the direct impact of any local climate changes would have been the impact to migrating herds of animals that the Neanderthal likely depended on. The ash from this eruption covered a broad area deep enough to kill the grasses and other life that existed at ground level. Any herds migrating into this area would have starved. In some Eastern Europe locations (mainly in what is now Bulgaria) under the ash layer in favorable settlement areas we see the Mousterian technology of the Neanderthal. Above the ash layer, we see the technology of early modern humans above. There has also been reported a clear delineation of middle to upper neolithic technology associated with the tephra layer.
Well stated, except that you mean Paleolithic, not Neolithic, ie Old Stone Age, not New Stone Age.
Yeah, Paleolithic, my bad.
just say contributed to the decline and the debate is over…the less you know the more you can assume…
It occurs to me that I’m currently working 10 km from the Neanderthal (Tal is German for valley, the Neanderthal is the place where the Neanderthal was found). And the place has twice the precipitation of the rest of Germany, and is constantly foggy all day. So I posit that the Neanderthal just didn’t get around much and adapted to an extremely damp shady climate.
Funny thing about the Neander Tal is that it was named in the 17th century for a pastor who called himself Joachim Neander, the Greek version of his German family name Neumann, which of course means “New Man”. Before about 1850, ie right before the discovery of the Old Man, the name of the feature was changed from Neander’s Hollow (Neandershöhle) to the Neander Valley (Neaderthal). Then later the spelling was changed from Thal to Tal.
The name change may have been because there had been so much limestone mining that the shape of the feature changed. German limestones have been very good for archaeology and paleontolgy, to include the bird-like dinosaur, Archaeopteryx.
The Weichselian climate of the Neander was probably even more dismal than now, colder, winder and drier, but still it was prime Neanderthal habitat because of water and shelter, in the form of the caves pockmarking its limestone formations. The water would also have attracted game.
“Scientists have long debated whether this eruption contributed to the final extinction of the Neanderthals.”
————
Final extinctions are much worse than temporary extinctions.
But maybe not as bad as an Ultimate extinction.
… but more so than an antepenultimate extinction.
I had my ante-pre-pen-ultimate extinction a couple of years ago.
Apparently.
I am (Type II) diabetic, and didn’t know I was liable to ‘silent ischaemia’ – that’s like a heart attack you have, but don’t feel.
I had a Company medical – which highlighted this likely issue.
The NHS gave me an echo-cardiogram, which confirmed the problem.
I then had a stent – plus ‘minor’ balloon work (‘angioplasty’?) – about a fifth of a year ago.
So – look out for these ante-pre-personal-extinction events . . . . .
And – if you are put on statins – SUGAR – if you feel lousy – o back to the doc and say – ‘I’m stopping taking this statin. Give me another’.
Here [at least] the docs do not emphasise that – and I think they should. Muchly!
Live long and be (very) happy!
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Sturgis Hooper March 21, 2015 at 12:04 pm
It is likely some genes are 100% neanderthal, and are expressed. Genetic crossover events between homologous sequences in human and neanderthal chromosomes would mix mommy’s and daddy’s DNA in gametes. Subsequent generations would have mixed segments of sapiens and neanderthalis DNA. Add to that founder effects, and it is very reasonable we have Neanderthal sequences. Today, segments of chromosomes are identified as Neanderthal. These presumably contain various genes, including all exons, introns, control elements, and intervening non-coding “junk” DNA. That’s a bit more than just some Neanderthal alleles. The original sapiens sequences could be entirely lost in Europeans.
You might well be right. I haven’t looked at the Neanderthal genome in that detail.
Remember this:
It it still true that we have no Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA?
So all the surviving lineages with Neanderthal gene-content originated from only the male-Neanderthal and female-AMH combination?
While forced crossings could certainly have been prevalent, isn’t the outcome suggestive that male Neanderthal could have been acceptable and even attractive, at least part of the time, to female-AMH?
With bias-crossing patterns (many carry a strong bias) in modern populations, it is virtually universal that a minority will buck the dominant trend. Although such crossings are typically biased about 25%-75% … the role of the 1 in 4 who buck the norm is not insignificant.
Even Charles Manson in his 70s has a comely thing with a yen for his sorry case.
With male-AMH sometimes finding something in a Neanderthal female, and said female for some reason (rebelliousness appearing to be the common factor) putting up with said pathetic male-AMH … the durability & persistence of mtDNA should have favored & increased its retention (relative to diploid DNA contributions from the extinct Neanderthal).
Indeed, reading between the lines a bit, when science came round to the idea that maybe these crossing did happen, they looked first for mtDNA (that also being the only kind they could acquire, at first). And between the lines, the labs were surprised to draw a blank.
So what’s up with that? The cover-story doesn’t seem to cover it very well …
Ted,
You are correct. Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA is way different from modern human groups and from the moderns living at the same time as they.
Before the whole Neanderthal genome was sequenced, this divergence in mtDNA gave ammunition to those who wanted to regard moderns and Neanderthals as different species.
We can only speculate, more or less educatedly, as to the implications of this fact. Intuitively it seems more likely that Neanderthal women mated under whatever circumstances with modern men, at least to produce offspring who contributed to present genomes, but the lack of Neanderthal mt DNA doesn’t necessarily undercut this assumption. There just is too little Neanderthal material in modern genomes for Neanderthal mother’s mt DNA to have survived so many generations of modern reproduction.
A link on Neanderthal mtDNA:
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics/ancient-dna-and-neanderthals/neanderthal-mitochondrial-dna
That’s a good set of pages at the Smithsonian, Sturgis – thanks!
Some answers will just take a little longer … I see off England they ‘interrogated’ the DNA of offshore sediment-mud – no macroscopic artifacts – and made all manner of Neolithic determinations. Fast times at DNA High.
If you got a Neanderthal fellow out today, gave him a shave, and a decent haircut, plus some nice threads, he would not look too out of place. Certainly you could have him walk abroad and not cause much interest at all 🙂
As for the Neanderthal women, I dont know, but maybe they would be similar to Klingon women, who did after all have certain charms 🙂
I expect that Neanderthal women among us would receive plenty of favorable attention, and would be receptive of it. We aren’t different species, though sometimes I misstate myself. And look at the range of sizes, shapes and styles represented among our own sub-populations.
Incidentally, the male Y chromosome has a very similar non-recombining character as the maternal mitochondrial DNA – it does not reshuffle with each mating. Y is of great interest for genealogy, and population-tracing … and there is excitement that we have found older & older examples of this stable genetic artifact. Pres. Thomas Jefferson was studied due to his family’s denial of African American relatives … and his Y is a well-known type that is believe to date to 42,000 years ago – back to the time in which this Post is set!
Other Y chromosomes have proven much older yet, and – this is my point – there is some hope that with diligent searching we may find living people carrying the Homo erectus Y.
If it really wiped out Neanderthals this ignumbrite stuff must have had an uncanny ability to distinguish moderns from Neanderthals and selectively aim its destructiveness only at Neanderthals. But if you want to know the truth, this and other volcanic eruptions simply did not cause any of that volcanic cooling that has been inculcated into your brain. What passes for volcanic cooling on numerous global temperature charts is nothing more than misidentification of El Nino valleys as volcanic cooling valleys.These so-called “volcanologists” have been scratching their heads about the strange observation that some volcanoes are followed by a distinct volcanic cooling while others are not. A recent comparison is El Chichon and Pinatubo. Pinatubo is followed by an alleged “volcanic cooling” while El Chichon is not.Pinatubo was studied at length by Self et al. (See “Fire and Mud” by Newhall and Punongbayan). They are clueless because they want to attribute floods along the Mississippi river in the summer of 1993 and drought in the Sahel to Pinatubo cooling. And then they state that “…surface cooling is clearly documented for some eruptions (for example, Gunung Agung, Bali, in 1963 as reported by … Hansen et al 1978) but not others, for example, El Chichon in Mexico in 1982…” Hansen’s name on a paper should be waening of pseudo-science to come and he does not disappoint us here. Self at al. were so close to the explanation of the observations but they simply did not take that one final step that would have made them them scientists instead of technicians. It would have required them to understand that the sawtooth pattern of global temperature curves is a densely packed concatenation of El Nino peaks with La Nina valleys and put that knowledge to use. Maybe not their fault if their climate courses left it out, Volcanic eruptions are not synchronized with the ENSO oscillation and when a volcano erupts it may coincide with any part of ENSO.. If it coincides with an El Nino peak it will be followed by a La Nina valley that looks like volcanic cooling. If it coincides with a La Nina valley it will be followed by an El Nino warm peak that is nothing like the expected cooling. The first case is like Pinatubo and will be followed by a regular La Nina valley. the second is like El Chichon and is followed immediately by an El Nino warm peak. There are also intermediate cases where the eruption coincided with an intermediate region between an El Nino peak and a La Nina valley. But so ingrained is this false teaching about volcanic cooling that it is even built into the climate models used by the IPCC. The CMIP5 models, for example, have an El Chichon cooling built into their software module despite the fact that there is no such thing in the real world as El Chichon cooling. What remains to be done is for someone to clean up the mess on existent global warming curves that show non-existent volcanic coolings inscribed onto them thanks to the pseudo-science of Hansen and his likes.
This paper goes into the same category as others which deny human-caused extinction of large mammals, that category being the modern-day sociology of peoples’ reluctance to accept unpalatable truths.
Could be. Perhaps more comforting for some to imagine that a volcano wiped out most of the Neanderthals, so the peace-loving Moderns just moved in to unpopulated territory recovering from the blast, to provide aid, comfort and TLC to the few surviving traumatized Neanderthal natural disaster victims.
But the history of Modern genocide and ecocide makes this peaceable kingdom scenario less plausible. Thousands of years before the eruption there is already evidence of mass murder in the Balkans. So different from today.
Not.
Sturgis Hooper
March 21, 2015 at 10:09 am
Ted Clayton
March 21, 2015 at 2:46 pm
Thanks for a wonderful education on early “Man”. I look to WUWT for these gems that come along and bring people like you two (and others) here. This thread was a somewhat silly thesis that offered an explanation for extinction of Neanderthal 25000 years ago when they were nearly already there. I didn’t expect it to become one of the most educational pieces of year.
I don’t have a link, but I remember someone telling me that remains of a family group of Neanderthal found in a cave, I believe, in Iran had two members who were looked after by the others. One had his face broken in and was probably at least partly blind and had a deformed arm from the accident. There was no way this fellow could have lived long enough for his bones to heal and he certainly cloudn’t hunt. The other was a man they determined to be much older than normal expectation for the subspecies. He had sever arthritis and other debilitating infirmities. Clearly it infers a caring creature who hunted for and protected these members of the group, a surprising discovery at the time. Have you heard of this?
You might be thinking of Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanidar_Cave
Evidence has mounted of Neanderthal care for children, the aged and infirm. Neanderthals were so subject to traumatic accidents that they could hardly have survived otherwise. But their group were small.
Yes, Shanidar 1
And the original Neander Tal specimen was hunched & bowed & twisted so badly, workers famously interpreted the then-new species as being only partly-erect and having a shuffling gait; the original Trogolodyte-brute … and indeed that was an accurate description of this individual, but it was because of his advance geriatric status and crippling arthritis, not that his species was poorly-evolved. That a person in such a state could survive in those conditions – the very first example found – says that helping each other was unlikely to have been unusual. Since then we have uncovered almost a parade of variously disabled Neanderthals.
In such small groups, where your human neighbors were a greater threat even than the impressive array of carnivore predators, every member was valuable.
Neanderthals didn’t even have dogs to warn them of leopards, wolves and hyenas in the night, nor to attack lions and bears on the prowl.
The little family groups were alone in a hostile world.
It’s seldom mentioned in articles like these that even at their height, the Neanderthal population never went above about 20,000. That includes the whole of Europe and the Middle East. There’s more polar bears in the arctic than that, even now. So this is a pretty fragile and easily threatened population.
That sounds about right, with their numbers fluctuating based upon available habitat. Might have been less much of the time:
http://www.livescience.com/5570-neanderthals-poised-extinction.html
I’d like to second Gary’s comment, and state that this blog is living up to its name as the best for science discussion in general, not just climate issues.
I often learn things here or find new ways of looking at things, even if I don’t always agree with the viewpoints expressed.
But then some estimate of Early Modern numbers would in order, do we have any ideas so that some comparison can be made ?
There is evidence of an H. s. sapiens population explosion in the 40-50 ka period:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/03/why-did-the-human-population-explode-40000-years-ago-todays-most-popular-.html
This coincides with the 45 ka warm phase of the last glaciation, when moderns expanded into Europe and NE Asia.
Absolute numbers would be conjectural, but surely swamping Neanderthals. This is along my line of thought. Moderns’ social organization and greater ability to exploit environments led to their outnumbering Neanderthals and Denisovans:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-07-28/humans-sheer-numbers-enabled-europe-dominance-40-000-years-ago
Did H.s.sapiens at that time have burial rituals? If so, that might exaggerate the difference between subspecies.
I mean in numbers.
Some researchers think that Neanderthals had burial rituals, but others disagree. It’s assumed that Moderns did.
Moderns must have been far more numerous than Neanderthals and Denisovans. Not only did they occupy prime habitat in tropical and southern subtropical Africa, but by 40 ka had already spread out across the Middle East and South Asia to Australia. They were moving into Central and North Asia as well as Europe, invading the turf of Neanderthals and Denisovans.
As opposed to surface-interment rituals, and collected at central (living-site) locations, that makes sense. If we are finding a good portion of AMH remains in burials.
However, the Venus figurines attest to massive milk-production capabilities, well back into the Paleolithic. The earliest go back to the time-frame of this Post. They are our earliest figurine-artifacts, and the oldest of all pottery/ceramic objects. They dominate Stone Age art. It is easy to infer that there was ‘something going on’, connected to these fecund little dolls … reasonably boiling down to a baby-factory-culture.
PETA convinced Neanderthals to give up hunting, and they all got stupid and died.
“brokenyogi March 21, 2015 at 5:19 pm”
The likely reached their apex of population during the last interglacial when they reached from the Levant, across what is Turkey, around the Caspian, across Kazakhstan into what is now Russia. During the last glaciation they were pushed back out of the plains by cold at the same time they were coming under pressure from early modern man from the south. By the time that volcano erupted, they had likely already lost half to two-thirds of their range. By that time they had regressed from hunting mammoth on the plains to chasing aurochs and reindeer through the woods.
Coprolite samples from Neanderthal living sites show they were absolutely riddled with parasites (hookworm, pinworm) in Europe toward the end. It is believed very few lived to be older than 35 years old. Horrific “rodeo” injuries are evident as they apparently wrestled huge animals with their bare hands in some cases. So by the end they would have been sickly, malnourished, diet including more berries and nuts indicating difficulty in hunting.
So we have a population that during the last interglacial (which was warmer than this one) were probably migratory plains dwellers much like the plains tribes of the US (before horses arrived) being driven into a more forested, wetter, colder area and probably becoming much less migratory, instead depending on the animals doing the migrating into their areas because they could not follow them into areas occupied by early modern man.
That eruption would have cut off those migration patterns of the animals and further isolated them. The flooding of what is now the Adriatic Sea might have been the final death knell for them. That area would have been a broad flat plain watered by the Po river that would have been a likely paradise for European bison, deer, and other migratory animals Once that area was flooded, there was likely a huge change in the ecology of that part of Europe and areas to the east. What is now the Adriatic was likely a huge wintering ground for various game species. Same when the Med rose high enough to exchange water with the Black Sea. The ecology there changed greatly, too.
If they ‘Wrestled’ large animals, it sort of suggests that even were Early Modern’s slightly more numerous, physical confrontation would have been a poor strategy for the newcomers ? So again I’m thinking that ‘Pressure’ inferring dominance could be the wrong slant. Of course I’m making the assumption of comparable cognitive abilities, and that the primitive human style of aggression whereby there is no shame in killing the young and vulnerable of competitors had yet to become a trait in those early days.
The modern invaders would have avoided close combat with Neanderthals at all costs. One of the great advantages of the Cro-Magnons’ Aurignacian culture was advanced projectile weapons, but even more so their tactical and indeed strategic thinking.
It was really nolo contendre, even more so than the firearm and steel weapon-armed Spanish v. hordes Aztec and Inca warriors (although admittedly aided by disease and the native enemies of those oppressive empires).
As mentioned (Sturgis Hooper March 22, 2015 at 12:04 pm), it would have been no contest. It would have been about the same as the Inuit and Thule against the Dorset people. The Neanderthal had no bows/arrows. In fact, what early modern was experimenting and rapidly evolving their technology, Neanderthal technology remained frozen in time for over 100,000 years. It would be almost as if their technology was itself ritual or something. Early modern archers could take out Neanderthal from a distance with bows and slings. It doesn’t appear that Neanderthal even threw rocks for hunting. They apparently had to close with their target to be within range to jab them with a spear, much like the Dorset people in the Arctic and probably suffered much the same fate as the Dorset did when facing a superior tech. The Dorset would simply run if they survived the arrows.
There is no sign of the bow & arrow until the transition between the upper Paleolithic and the early Mesolithic, about 10,000 years ago. The Neanderthal were long-gone, well before the advent of the bow.
The modern-type humans who encountered the Neanderthal had no long-range or high-speed projectile-weapon. They had spears, and possibly the atlatl.
Although the Neanderthal appear to have favored the hand-held spear which is wielded much like a pike (which were a leading choice of elite mercenary personnel & forces during the Middle Ages, right up until gunpowder), intimations that they were incapable of throwing a spear, or that they would be befuddled by others doing so, take the legitimate factors too far.
For starters, the anatomy that gave the Neanderthal his advantage with the thrusting-spear, is common in modern populations. We don’t have to wonder how this detail of the upper-body build would affect their throwing – millions of us have this trait today.
Absolutely, this shoulder-construction can indeed throw. It lacks the ‘spring-loaded’ fling-throw action prized in Major League pitchers, and which we think became important with earliest Homo, or perhaps even in Australopithecus.
But this shoulder-type absolutely & certainly does still throw, and is particularly adapted to throwing heavy things. It can’t reach the highest throwing-speeds with light-weight objects, but it has excellent control & accuracy coupled with unusual leverage, and excels at ‘power-throwing’. Neanderthal could pitch cannonballs across the home-plate at deadly speeds. They would not use the same motion as a top pitcher, but they could lay down heavy artillery fire at considerable range.
Early Cro Magnon did not have the bow, and Neanderthal certainly inherited the basic human throwing instincts & proclivities that had been burned into the early-human genome for a million or two years, by the time they emerged as a separate population.
Thanks, that’s a very helpful description of the decline of the Neanderthals
I don’t believe they are extinct. Ever been to Walmart?
They could be reclassified as Neandermalls.
That’s a good one Max. But seriously, there is some willful data selection going on, or good ol’ selection-bias, in the characterization of Modern Human as being within a particular type-range, and not including some of those other types or having that much range.
We used to have ectomorph, endomorph and mesomorph body or “Somatic Types”. This is no longer freely circulating, but it was & remains basically ‘just observational’. (The basic Biology principle referenced may have been weak; that these over-all body types (and whispered, mental traits … which any dairy/beef farmer will affirm do exist too) arise from differential emphasis on ecto, endo or mesothelium foundation-tissues during development (ontogeny?).)
Tragedies in the Killing Fields and Africa have been met by local folks collecting skulls and neatly stacking them in low walls. Journalists documenting events include photos of these collections … unintentionally recording quite-surprising variation in cranial features.
And then, though it may be half a million years back, the modern type and the Neanderthal do share a common ancestor, which had diversified in partially-isolated populations for a long time. We can readily harbor ‘primitive’ traits that may or may not be ‘actually’ Neanderthal, but will typically be credited as such.
I am 5’7″ and wear an XL shirt. Medium-build, classic mesomorph. Huge teeth, with even more-dismaying roots. ‘Neanderthal’ shoulder-rotation.
Neanderthal-shoulder is the basis for the claim that these people could not throw well, did not have throwing-spears, and that they had great power & torque which favored the close-quarters attack and even ‘wrestling’ large game.
You can test for Neanderthal-shoulder (most with it already know they are ‘different’). The fast, easy, accurate & safe test is, lay down on the floor and fully extend the arms so they are laying stretched-out on the floor, ‘over your head’. Pick your spot so your hands lay on the floor between a door-frame. Palms-up.
Now, have a child or small adult stand on your hands (balancing with their hands on the door-frame), and lift them straight up, keeping the arms fully extended. This is a severely-disadvantageous lift-angle, for ‘standard’ people. ‘Can’t do it’, even with a light weight, typically (don’t strain at it – it’s not a Test To Destruction! ;).
If you have The Shoulder, it’s easy. Mesomorphs with this configuration (it is mainly a matter of how muscles anchor into the shoulder-blade) can perform this seemingly-adverse lift very nearly as easily as they can do a straight bench-press, or push-up.
A second test, which carries a significant risk of injury, is to lay face-down on the floor with the arms again extended overhead, and ‘bridge’ yourself up off the floor. With ‘the shoulder’, one pops right up off the floor. They sell little wheels with the axle extending out either side as handles, which guys use to practice this exercise.
You can ‘work-up’ to the face-down bridge, by starting from a kneeling push-up position (‘girls push-up’), and start moving the hands further & further out in front of yourself. You can also start with the wheel directly beneath you, going out just a little at a time, but the wheel is squirrely, esp. at first, and hazardous.
Yet at the same time, I have a short torso, very short arms, and a ‘Paul Newman’ baby-face and short, compact jaw … all of which are not-Neanderthal.
Neanderthal had no Trademark, Patent or chicken-wing-lock on probably any of the traits ‘classically’ associated with them … and worse, we often see Neandermall and Bufforilla specimens with clearly not-modern but also not-Neander traits.
I doubt that bows and arrows were part of the Aurignacian tool kit, but spear throwers (atl-atls) probably were. This discusses the Neanderthal projectile problem:
http://phys.org/news151326825.html
Interestingly, the H. heidelbergensis ancestor of moderns and Neanderthals did apparently use javelins, both pure wood and stone-tipped:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/11/131126-oldest-javelins-stone-weapons-projectiles-human-evolution-science/
http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/article00592.html
This paper further-belabors the known-known – that Neanderthal aren’t hot properties in MLB.
Many people and groups who are sub-optimum at throwing, though, still get good things done with it. Tim Tebow has a goofy, awkward throwing-motion. The best throwing-coaches & trainers in the history of the planet tried to cure him of it, unsuccessfully. And he still beat the Pittsburgh Steelers, using that crude throwing-style that no team would hire.
The Army had a ‘regulation’ way to throw a hand-grenade, but serious warriors often would practice both the official way, and their ‘wrong’ way which they could get better results with. Many people actually cannot throw the right way, well at all.
Old-time Eskimos still made a decent living, under the worst of conditions, largely relying on spears launched from their squat, round bodies and short, heavy arms, wrapped in a cocoon of leather layers. Old-time Pygmies proudly posed for National Geographic with their spears. Pygmies a match for the Massi? No way – but they got the job done.
Anyone who rides herd on or hangs around a bunch of little kids knows that the expression of throwing (and hitting) behaviors is deeply instinctual. That is why we see so many who are throwing-compromised, nonetheless assiduously cultivating their relatively unimpressive skill at it, pouring sustained effort into compensating for often multiple maladaptations & shortcomings in the throwing-department.
Many of us are not the world’s best lovers, but good ol’ instinct (ie, a built-in reward for the behavior) keeps us working at it anyway.
Throwing really bears comparison to firearms. You don’t have to be real good, a high-achiever, or genetically-favored. Adequate; half-blind, unsteady & all – is good enough.
And that’s why it’s a case of sweet-talking ourselves down a Primrose Path – an unforced intellectual error – to lean heavily on Neanderthal’s no-doubt sub-optimum throwing-anatomy as a key or pivotal factor in their replacement by modern humans.
Home erectus was also present at very light levels on the land. H. heidelbergensis, likewise few & far between. In this regard, Neanderthal was only carrying on venerable tradition. Were these people failures or failing, because they had a small population, or lived in small groups? Actually, a robust population had never existed, before the modern type.
My default explanation is, pre-modern humans were born fighting, and got better at it through constant life-long practice. They attacked & killed each other until the scattered survivors were too hard to reach or find. That’s why their numbers were low, and genetic bottlenecks arose at times.
Modern humans swamped-out their preceding groups (and in some ways, betters), in the bedroom and at the kitchen table. Check out those Venus figurines. That, and we have a marginally reduced need to go for each others’ throat at the first chance/excuse … we can tolerate each other in larger numbers, and at higher densities. Neanderthal & Co were Yanomamo on major drugs.
The Neandermalls are just morbidly obese Moderns. And the staff are just morbidly stupid Moderns. But at least they have jobs.
There were few fat Neanderthals.
Great joke, though.
This question has a super duper easy answer: No.
Since homosapien-neanderthal and homosapien-sapien interbred it is biologically incorrect to classify them as separate species (which is defined as two organism unable to produce viable offspring). So no. Neanderthal man was not “wiped out” by anything.
That’s simply not true. Lions and tigers, for example, can interbreed, but they are still considered separate species. The same is true of many members of the same genus, who can interbreed but are still considered separate species.
Even so, Neanderthalis is usually considered a sub-species of homo sapiens, not an entirely different species. Modern humans are referred to as homo sapiens sapiens to differentiate them.
By the definition of a species, if they can produce viable offspring they are the same species. The term is a technical definition. While popular usage attributed the term to things which can share genes to produce viable young, it is factually incorrect to do so.
Nothing prevents subspecies or even local populations from being wiped out, as have been so many tribes throughout human history. Even if some of their genes survive, as a distinct group, they’re gone. In the case of Neanderthals, with at the very most 40% of their genome surviving, spread around among modern humans, there can be no doubt that they were effectively wiped out. None of their distinguishing, characteristic anatomy remains in a single individual. No one today shows their defining brain, skull and other anatomical features. Their culture likewise is entirely kaput.
The skulls characterised as “Neanderthal” fit entirely within the 98th percentile of divergence from the average size and shape of modern homosapien-sapiens .There are two percent of human beings on this planet with a more “Neanderthal” skull than any Neanderthal skull found to date.
Nobody alive today exhibits all the classical Neanderthal distinguishing characteristics (some changed slightly over 300,000 years), either cranial or post-cranial, let alone both. Very few exhibit even one or some of them.
While living on Molokai (Hawaiian Island), I was astonished to meet a very nice Christian woman who had all the obvious features of a Neanderthal, sloping forehead, extremely prominent brow ridge, no chin, stocky build, etc. As a native Hawaiian, she showed a heavily Austroloid heritage, but then, did Neanderthal genes ever occur in Austroloid populations? I’ve been wondering about this for years now. Somebody?
Austroloids have some Neander and more Denisovan as I recall it.
Having many “primative” traits myself, I am likely high in Neander ancestry. Including large head, large teeth, small larynx, short legs, long thick body, long arms, etc, etc. INHO, Neanders were smarter (so did not need as much material culture) but the males had a fondness for those thin agile Modern women… and as a result the species disappeared along with the mtDNA. Much like central asian graves start out European types, then some Asian women mixed in, and eventually the current population ends up almost all Asian type with the odd redhead… no war needed. Just a gradual transition in a couple of thousand years.
Neanderthals’ bodies were short, not long, at least by modern European standards. They were compact.
They were not smarter than moderns. Their capacity for innovation was limited at best.
No Neanderthal Y chromosomes have yet been found in modern humans, so your scenario appears implausible.
If it came to a fight between male moderns and Neanderthals over the modern women, the natives would lose. Their numbers were too few, their technology too primitive and their organizational skills too limited.
As for East Asian bodies appearing in Central Asian graves, that too was much more likely war than sexual attractiveness. Waves of Mongolian invaders changed the genetic mix of Central Asia, and before them Huns, Avars, etc.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1180246/
“Claim: Did volcanic induced climate change wipe out Neanderthals 40,000 years ago?”
No…….they were just relocated to 760 United Nations Plaza, New York, New York 10017, United States.
I have a pet theory. As a geologist who has studied paleontology and is aware of the “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” principle (it seems poets we are not) which, simply put says that critters (including us) re-pass through our evolution in the course of our early development- embryo through early childhood. It is hard to not conclude this with such things as the key-hole brachiopod (shellfish) which has an ancestor in which the shell grows out in two lobes the edges of which coalesce, leaving an open hole through the shell. In the more modern relative, this “keyhole” of the ancient adult is present in the young shell but fills in with maturity. Many examples, like the evolution of the horse (train of fossils in rocks of increasingly younger age) are most convincing.
In humans, we tend to end the process after the child is born, probably because of the hubris of the commanding species. Having raised six children plus two nieces, I believe I could see the simian behavior of the pre-language infant, the Neanderthal, demanding, unreasoning of the 2-4 year old, the cromagnon enightenment of the 8 year old…….