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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Cultures have long memories – And those memories both save lives (only the survivors of some past disaster remember the threat!) but those memories will not doubt be based on some original fact that some original bard or songwriter or poet and “priest” actually saw.
Thus, just like the universal tradition of “dragons” can be traced to actual dinosaur fossils found in rocks and cliffs, should not we “find” Neanderthal bones and skulls found in caves across Europe in the verbal traditions of trolls, giants, and orcs?
Also the biblical “giants in the earth”.
“I resent being told I interbred with Neanderthals!”
We know what you did last summer!
If Sturgis Hooper is right in his statement that there is no evidence of Y chromosome Neanderthal DNA in modern humans then does this not present a conundrum? This would suggest no inheritance via the male line yet the lack of mtDNA would suggest no inheritance via the female line!
What if the marauding theory is true but with an additional idea that they may have had the primitive idea that boys were the offspring of the father and that girls were the offspring of the mother. Is it possible that women who were raped by these stone age “Vikings” would kill their male offspring. That would at least explain the data.
Hooper’s other assertions that the Neanderthals were less technically advanced and were poorly organised needs some supporting evidence. As others have argued they appear to have cared for their sick and had art and religion. There is little evidence of any of these things in so called sapiens sapiens until they met up with the Neanderthals. In my view technology and culture evolved in the Neanderthals rather than the other way round but it is really all guesswork at the moment.
There is abundant evidence for modern art, music, painting, fishing and advanced technology long before we encountered Neanderthals.
There is very little evidence for similar behaviors among Neanderthals, all of it questionable. As noted above, their stone-working technology didn’t change for hundreds of thousands of years, until possibly at the very end, when they may have copied moderns.
I pointed out that Neanderthal population was small and scattered. Their occupation sites show much smaller groups than among moderns. Besides which their brains show less development in the centers responsible for higher thought and social reasoning, but more development in regions for vision and bodily movement. The remains show far more degenerative disease, trauma, sickness, infection and injury than moderns from the same period. They always lived close to extinction. It didn’t take much to push them over. They were doomed even without the Campanian eruption.
Your boy baby killing scenario makes no sense. Neither mtDNA nor Y chromosomes from Neanderthals have been found among living humans. Neanderthals were effectively wiped out. When you leave only 2% of your genes in the non-sub-Saharan African population and maybe only 20% of your genes exist, you’re extinct as a sub-species.
Extinct American Indian tribes have left far more of a genetic signature than Neandedrthals, yet nobody claims that Arawaks still exist.
I should also mention again however that the male hybrids apparently suffered reduced fertility, which is not surrpising from cross sub-species mating.
deeply implemented genetic drift by ‘volcanic induced
climate change’ –
humans only.
They were voted out of the group at the subspecies conference and 97 percent were in agreement. It’s all in the report and cave journals, don’t you know
Well it could have been the case, but what do palaeoanthropologists say about this from skeletal remains. Neanderthals had evolved for a cold climate, body shape rather like the Inuits who had a metabolism that converted energy from fat and protein.not carbohydrates, but they didn’t live near glaciers, and hunted mainly rather than gathering. They were protein or meat eaters only. Nor did they fish from evidence found. They did not live long either. We are not sure about their numbers either. The more technologically advanced Homo sapien sapiens from Africa seem to have genetically dominated eventually. But surprisingly some modern Asian races DNA can only date back to around 70,000 years ago although there is evidence and fossils of archaic humans. But a large volcanic eruption like Toba is thought to have killed off a lot of archaic humans. But if your food source is killed too, and there is no evidence megafauna or other mammals in Europe, that modern humans did hunt also, to have died out It was probably a warm interglacial that killed them off eventually and it is believed that they drifted off North to follow the mammoths. I don’t believe this either, if they could not breed and their offspring breed they would have died out naturally. Maybe some females or children came to interbreed with modern humans too.
There is sparse evidence of this too.