New research suggests climate change may have contributed to extinction of Neanderthals
A researcher at the University of Colorado Denver has found that Neanderthals in Europe showed signs of nutritional stress during periods of extreme cold, suggesting climate change may have contributed to their demise around 40,000 years ago.
Jamie Hodgkins, a zooarchaeologist and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at CU Denver, analyzed the remains of prey animals and found that Neanderthals worked especially hard to extract every calorie from the meat and bones during colder time periods. Her results were published in the Journal of Human Evolution last week.
Hodgkins examined bones discovered in caves once inhabited by Neanderthals in southwestern France for marks demonstrating how the carcasses of deer and other animals were butchered and used for food. During colder, glacial periods, the bones were more heavily processed. In particular, they showed higher frequencies of percussion marks, indicating a nutritional need to consume all of the marrow, probably signaling reduced food availability.
“Our research uncovers a pattern showing that cold, harsh environments were stressful for Neanderthals,” said Hodgkins. “As the climate got colder, Neanderthals had to put more into extracting nutrients from bones. This is especially apparent in evidence that reveals Neanderthals attempted to break open even low marrow yield bones, like the small bones of the feet.”
These findings further support the hypothesis that changing climate was a factor in Neanderthal extinction.
“Our results illustrate that climate change has real effects,” said Hodgkins. “Studying Neanderthal behavior is an opportunity to understand how a rapidly changing climate affected our closest human relatives in the past. If Neanderthal populations were already on the edge of survival at the end of the Ice Age, the increased competition that occurred when modern humans appeared on the scene may have pushed them over the edge.”
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We took their food and women – killed the rest.
If so, how come there is no Neanderthal mt-dna (which is transmitted by women) in modern humans. The traffic seems to have all gone the other way, from neanderthal males to sapiens females.
Unreplenished minority mt genes should die out in a larger population.
They took our women, so we killed them all.
Now seriously, they were very strong close-range hunters of dangerous prey. We have very few remains, yet we know that they led very dangerous lives and sustained a lot of wounds, many from infighting. As top predators they must have been very, very aggressive, and territorial. We know they exterminated rival clans quite often (at least two occurrences documented). Now, how do you think they would have reacted to the arrival of AMH to their territories? Conflict was served, and they fought it to the bitter end.
We have seen the same too many times to pretend otherwise. North American indians suffered the same fate at the hands of Europeans, except it didn’t go all the way to extinction except for some tribes. How much native-american ancestry has the current US population? 2%?
The extermination of Neanderthals is just an episode of the megafauna extermination caused by AMH wherever they went.
Pat,
No doubt you’re right. But maybe we ate their female babies, too.
The traffic seems to have all gone the other way, from neanderthal males to sapiens females.
==================
that is an easy one. today, in populations across the globe, regardless of social taboos, 17% of all children are not fathered by the person that thinks they are the father.
what this means is at a minimum, 1/3 of all human females have more than one partner at the time they get pregnant. all across the earth.
males talk about fooling around on their partners. not thinking to ask how this is possible without females fooling around as well. what better answer to survival, than to have multiple males all thinking they are the father.
Ferd,
Right on. Selective pressure has fine tuned human development so that babies resemble their fathers more than their mothers, preferentially expressing paternal traits when young more than maternal. But not too much, just in case there was the cave equivalent of a milk man in the mix. Thus, the putative dad will be attracted to his child, but nature plays it safe and doesn’t overdo it.
The shape of the human penis also evolved to help pump first coming sperm out of the vagina, back when the best hunter got first dibs on the most desirable women in the band, as is usually if not universally still the case among the dwindling population of hunter-gatherers.
Crap of the highest order, but anything that you can attribute to climate change increases your chance of exposure. Charge people less for degrees in chemistry, physics, engineering etc. and let their schooling be subsidized by degrees in sociology, history, English, women’s studies et al.
Grant, a not so gentle chide. Your comment is ignorant, and undermines the general skeptic case here against the general CAGW claims. Please either educate yourself, or go elsewhere.
exactly as we find today, probably 90% of human habitation over the past million years lies along the coast. Due to the current interglacial, most of that is now below sea level. what we find in the fossil records is the history of the relatively few people that lived in the interior. this gives us a skewed view of human development.
True, since glacial intervals last longer than interglacials. But the Eemian and some prior interglacials were warmer than now, with higher sea level. The toasty Eemian of course occurred without benefit of a Neanderthal industrial age.
An archeological wag once suggested that characteristic Solutrean point, similar to the Clovis in America, was used for opening clams.
most of the instruments used in modern surgery were derived from carpenter’s tools. if it cuts wood, it cuts bone.
By the way,
Thank you guys or guyesses for your expertise.
See even the dumbest of thread heads, can lead to a wealth of education, for those of us who were otherwise engaged, way back when. WUWT is way better that SciAm or NatGeo, for getting to the nuts and bolts of some of these fascinating journeys of our past.
My eternal thanks for your knowledge.
G
Second George.
“But the Eemian and some prior interglacials were warmer than now, with higher sea level.”
True, but Eemian (or older) coastal sites are virtually unheard of, except perhaps in South Africa. It would seem that the coastal adaptation may have evolved first there. By late last glaciation coastal lifestyles were probably widespread. Up north in Sweden where late glacial coastlines are preserved thanks to isostasy coastal site from Alleröd-Younger Dryas are fairly common. Many are from what was then offshore islands, so boats must have been in use. And remember that people reached Buka in the Solomons 30,000 years ago and Manus by 15,000 years ago.
But the solutreans were apparently inveterate landlubbers. They never even got to Corsica, which is actually visible from the mainland.
Tty,
Corsica might not have attracted Solutreans, since it was heavily glaciated during the Würmian.
Since the LGM coasts are now submerged, I would suggest that we can’t really know to what extent Solutreans were seafarers. For all we know, they might have hunted seals on land fast ice, like the Inuit and other Eskimos.
PS: And if they did visit Corsican beaches, those sites would now be submerged.
“Corsica might not have attracted Solutreans, since it was heavily glaciated during the Würmian.”
No it wasn’t. There was some montane glaciation on the central mountain range that’s all. Very much less glaciation than in some of the areas the solutrean settled on the mainland (e. g. Pyrenees, Massif Central) and Sardinia (at that time contiguous with Corsica) wasn’t glaciated at all. Details:
http://www.univie.ac.at/ajes/archive/volume_97/kuhlemann_et_al_ajes_v97.pdf
“For all we know, they might have hunted seals on land fast ice, like the Inuit and other Eskimos.”
Land fast ice? In the mediterranean? No, not even at glacial maximum. In the Bay of Biscay, possibly yes. And what is/was special to inuits is essentially that they weren’t dependent on hunting on fast ice due to their very advanced kayaks. And if the solutreans were using fast ice, how come they never made it to Ireland either? Or do you think they never left beaches except in southern France and Spain? And while they settled at Gibraltar they apparently never made it Morocco either, or the Balearics, or the Canaries, or Madeira for that matter.
And by the way we know what Solutrean points were used for. They were projectile points as shown by Plisson and Geneste by use-wear analysis more than 20 years ago.
Jung ug da grr ooh ,(sarc)
Inbreeding among Neanderthals can also have been a factor in going extinct. A bone dated to at least 50,000 years ago has been determined to have parentage who were “… either half-siblings who had a mother in common, double first cousins, an uncle and a niece, an aunt and a nephew, a grandfather and a granddaughter, or a grandmother and a grandson.” As per (2014) ” The complete genome sequence of a Neanderthal from Altai mountains”, by K.Prufer, et.al. Figure 3 charts this homo-zygosity & authors remark in text how “… hetero-zygosity in Neanderthals … is among the lowest measured for any organism ….”
Inbreeding was less of a problem for Nenderthals as it is for sapiens. Their population bottlenecks, strong genetic drift and long term inbreeding probably had reduced a lot the frequency of deleterious alleles, so probably the deleterious charge per individual was probably not too different to ours.
There’s a lot of people searching for excuses an alternative explanations to the obvious answer. The arrival of sapiens marked the end of Neanderthals as the arrival of Europeans to North America marked the end of Native Americans. Sapiens killed them off through more advanced culture and higher numbers. A lot of big mammals suffered the same fate at the same time in Europe and Neanderthals were just one of them. It is clear that the cause has to be the same, so it cannot be inbreeding, low numbers, low reproductive rate, high energy requirements, or climate change. Sapiens killed them all. A hunter-gatherer so resourceful that it could extinct many of their prey without consequences.
While I agree that AMHs killed off the Neanderthals by one means or another, much of the devastation wrought by Europeans on American Indian populations was caused by diseases rather than warfare and enslavement alone. And in a wrinkle, the indigenous population ate captive invaders, not the other way around.
Diseases may well be part of the explanation, but remember that neanderthals certainly carried pathogens too, and immune systems tailored to them. It is probably not a coincidence that neanderthal genes seem to be particularly common in those parts of the genome that are linked to the immune system, while for example genes connected with language are “neanderthal deserts”, i e neanderthal genes there have been selected against.
It has even beren hypotesized the autoimmune diseases may be particularly common in non-african humans because we have a hybrid immune system.
““Our research uncovers a pattern showing that cold, harsh environments were stressful for Neanderthals,” ”
Yes, I imagine a period of colder climate would cause great distress to the CAGW climate Neanderthals.
Cold is stressful for Homo sapiens as well. Read up on the really big european famines like in the 1310’s och 1690’s. Hint: those weren’t hot decades.
From that font of lots of wisdom, Wikipedia……
“At some Levantine sites, Neanderthal remains date from after the same sites were vacated by modern humans. Mammal fossils of the same time period show cold-adapted animals were present alongside these Neanderthals in this region of the Eastern Mediterranean. This implies Neanderthals were better adapted biologically to cold weather than modern humans and at times displaced them in parts of the Middle East when the climate got cold enough”.
Hmmmmn……that suggests that Neanderthals got along quite nicely in the cold.
That there was a bit of extra stress during periods of extreme cold is hardly a surprise.
Rather than extreme cold killing off Neanderthals it may have been competition for resources with modern humans in areas that both could inhabit. Neanderthals required more energy/food than modern humans. So warming sufficient to allow modern humans to move in
Modern humans seem to have lived in larger groups than Neanderthals and have better organised social structures, allowing them to exploit more than the just the local area.
For example Australian aboriginal groups traded material across the continent, equivalent to someone in [to become] London trading sought after stone and pigment with someone in [to become] Moscow.
According to Hoffecker [A Prehistory of the North: Human Settlement of the Higher Latitudes]….”There is no reason to suggest that the Neanderthals became extinct because they could not adapt to changing environments at this time “.
Can’t understand how such a thread works without
https://g.co/kgs/HBw3l
Well, you’ve fixed that 🙂
Great thread.
h/t, Bartleby
There is a problem though. 40,000 years ago we had a warm interstadial known as Maritieme Isotope Stage 3, following the early Weichselian glaciations of 90,000 and 60,000 years ago with an abundance of wide spread evidence that the temperatures were about the same as nowadays.
MIS 3 could not have had temperatures about as nowadays since sea level was much lower than current. Large Northern Europe ice sheets existed at the time, causing a significant cooling.
Actually MIS 3 was very variable. Parts of it were mild, parts quite severe. And ice volumes were always much larger than now. The neanderthals died out just about at the maximum of Stadial 3.2 at which time the north europen ice-sheet wasn’t that much smaller than at LGM:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/229865514_The_Scandinavian_Ice_Sheet_From_MIS_4_to_the_end_of_the_Last_Glacial_Maximum
It’s always climate change. They carefully avoid the use of the term global cooling.
Good to know that cold kills and warm is good.
That guy looks like a few people I know.
When I first saw the photo I thought this was a story about Rajendra Pachauri, former Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Nope, Rahendra doesn’t use a scrunchy to keep his hair in place … the guy in the photo puts a little more effort into his appearance than does Rahendra.
“Instead of blathering and bloviating, why not try to explain from a creationist perspective why human chromosome #2 consists of two smaller chimp (gorilla and orang) chromosomes stuck together, which is why we have 23 pairs and they have 24?
Then please tell me why evolution doesn’t happen when I can, with the simplest possible point mutation (deleting a single base), turn a sugar-eating bacterium into a nylon-eating bacterium. That is, I can make a new species in about 20 minutes.”
DB
The creationist perspective for that happening is humans were made in the image of their creator. Just like you can make a new species in 20 minutes.
Michael,
So the creator’s image is like an upright walking chimp? Or is it like a nylon-eating bacterium?
In any case, continuously creating new species is not what the Bible says that this hypothetical creator did or does. Humans can and do make new species, but using the same evolutionary processes as observed in nature.
The Word of God, ie the Bible in its many forms, is valuable for what it says. The Work of God, ie the observable universe, is valuable for what it shows us has happened and can be made to happen. For the purposes of physical and life science, the Work counts; the Word, not so much.
God invented Evolution
Well, Genesis 1 does say that the earth and the waters brought forth living things, not that God created each kind individually.
While it’s interesting to speculate that cold/warm may have contributed to their demise it could equally have had something to do with isolated (inbred) communities that, over generations, eventually got some ‘bug’ and then (locally) died like flies.
I suppose that if one were looking for a ‘climate’ link then one will find it with a big enough grant and ignore the alternative theories. The idea that they survived a whole bunch if temperature changes over 100’s of thousands of years leads me to believe that temperature wasn’t a major issue when it came to extinction.
Neanderthals survived several cycles of glaciation/deglaciation over about 600,000 years. If you want to play the “correlation = causation” game, the only major change in their environment between 40,000 and 28,000 years ago when they went extinct was immigration into Europe from south of the Mediterranean by Homo sapiens.
Your point is valid and salient, made above by others and me.
But Neanderthals aren’t quite that old. Neanderthal-style skull traits have been found in 400,000 year old fossils from Spain. As with most evolution, it’s hard to say when a population quits being H. heidelbergensis and becomes H. s. neanderthalensis, but the full suite of characteristic traits was present before 200 Ka, and probably quite a while earlier.
The common ancestor of Moderns and Neanderthals surely lived 600 Ka, however. The interglacial of around 400 Ka was warm, allowing humans to reinvade at least southern Europe. Neanderthals developed cultural behaviors and perhaps physical traits to allow them to remain and survive in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East through subsequent glaciations.
No evidence that neanderthals were ever anywhere in North Africa. There is a reasonably good fossil record from Morocco and those are early sapiens back to about 200,000 years ago, like elsewhere in Africa.
Neanderthals have only been found in Europe and in western Asia as far east as the Altai and in parts of the Near East. However they are only known in the Levant south of the Taurus-Zagros ranges from a rather brief beriod c. 50-80,000 years ago.
Tty,
You may well be right that there is no archaeological or paleontological evidence for Neanderthals in North Africa, but there is genetic evidence:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0047765
When we say that Africans lack Neanderthal DNA, what we really mean is Sub-Saharan Africans. The study concludes that the Neanderthal DNA in modern North Africans comes from ancient mixing rather than having drifted in from contact with western Asians or Europeans.
Gibraltar Strait and between Sicily and Africa were even narrower for most of Neanderthal time, and the Sinai less forbidding.
Tty,
I replied, but apparently am being moderated. Others of my responses, as to John, have also been censored. In case that’s the situation here, at the risk of repeat commenting, here’s genetic evidence for the presence of Neanderthals in N. Africa, whatever might be the case with fossil or artifact evidence:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0047765
There is significant neanderthal gene admixture in e. g. Greenland inuits, Australian aborigines and New Zealand maoris (as a matter of fact rather more in inuits than in Europeans). That is not evidence that neanderthals were ever present in Greenland, Australia and New Zealand, only that all humans outside subsaharan Africa have neanderthals among their ancestors. Homo sapiens has moved about quite a bit in the last 50,000 years you know.
North Africans have fair skin. They must have gotten those genes from Out of Africa back migration, together with Neanderthal DNA.
Neanderthal DNA has made it as far as some Khoisan tribes. However there is no evidence that any Neanderthal was ever in Africa.
Apparently my answer has also disappeared, so I’ll repeat: Inuit in Greenland and Maoris in New Zealand have neanderthal genes (inuits rather more tha Europeans as a matter of fact), but this is not evidence for the former presence of neanderthals in Greenland and New Zealand. Humans have moved quite a bit in 50,000 years.
As I said in my disappeared response, the study found that the Neanderthal DNA had not drifted in from the Near East or Europe, but was anciently local.
The straits at Gibraltar and between Sicily and Africa were narrower for most of Neanderthal time, and Sinai less forbidding. So the non-Neanderthal people are from Sub-Saharan Africa, not all of Africa.
It seems reasonable that at least under some environmental conditions, Neanderthals from the Levant would have made it into the Nile Valley, if not farther west. Island hopping on purpose or by accident from Europe is also possible.
However, they might have been thin on the ground, so left no physical traces.
I give up. My reply disappeared again.
I mentioned that Neanderthals could have entered Africa via the Sinai or across the narrower straits from Europe, and that the study I linked found N. African DNA to be local. The strictly non-Neanderthal people are from Sub-Saharan Africa rather than North Africa.
I won’t try again.
I don’t know if I’m still 86ed from commenting on Neanderthals, but will give it a try.
In previous attempts to post comments, I mentioned that Neanderthals could have entered Africa via the Sinai or across the narrower straits from Europe, and that the study I linked found N. African DNA to be local.
The strictly non-Neanderthal people are from Sub-Saharan Africa rather than North Africa. In the first half or more of the last century, physical anthropologists thought they had found Neanderthal material from Morocco and Malta.
No surprise that there is no physical evidence of Neanderthals in the Nile Valley, for instance, as they would have been thin on the ground and not continuously present.
The Sinai Peninsula is a subplate of the African Plate located at the triple junction of the Gulf of Suez rift, the Dead Sea Transform fault and the Red Sea rift. The Neanderthaliferous caves in Israel just aren’t that far from the Sinai. During the intervals in which Neanderthals rather than Moderns occupied the Levant, it’s hard to imagine what would have kept Neanderthals out of Sinai and the Nile Valley. Except maybe hostile Moderns.
Here goes nothing.
Inuit and Maoris have an Asian origin and also have Denisovian genes.
Again not evidence for the presence of Denisovians in Greenland or New Zealand.
As for me, an Australian of very mixed Celtic origin and with a hint of red hair, I probably carry some Neanderthal DNA but that is not evidence for the presence of Neanderthals in Australia.
I don’t know if I’m still 86ed from commenting on Neanderthals, but will give it a try.
In previous attempts to post comments, I mentioned that Neanderthals could have entered Africa via the Sinai or across the then narrower straits from Europe (Spain-Morocco and the Sicily-Tunisia), and that the study I linked found N. African DNA to have been ancient and local.
The strictly non-Neanderthal people are from Sub-Saharan Africa rather than North Africa. In the first half or more of the last century, physical anthropologists thought they had found Neanderthal material from Morocco and Malta.
No surprise that there is no physical evidence of Neanderthals in the Nile Valley, for instance, as they would have been thin on the ground and not continuously present.
The Sinai Peninsula is a subplate of the African Plate located at the triple junction of the Gulf of Suez rift, the Dead Sea Transform fault and the Red Sea rift. The Neanderthaliferous caves in Israel just aren’t that far from the Sinai. During the intervals in which Neanderthals rather than Moderns occupied the Levant, it’s hard to imagine what would have kept Neanderthals out of Sinai and the Nile Valley. Except maybe hostile Moderns.
Here goes, probably nothing.
I give up. My reply disappeared again.
I mentioned that Neanderthals could have entered Africa via the Sinai or across the narrower straits from Europe, and that the study I linked found N. African DNA to be local.
The strictly non-Neanderthal people are from Sub-Saharan Africa rather than North Africa.
No surprise that there is no physical evidence of Neanderthals in the Nile Valley, for instance, as they would have been thin on the ground and not continuously present.
I won’t try again.
Sorry for the duplicates.
“As I said in my disappeared response, the study found that the Neanderthal DNA had not drifted in from the Near East or Europe, but was anciently local.”
“Anciently local” must mean that it is found in the berber populations, which is the oldest population stratum in N Africa. They almost certainly “drifted in” from from the Near East in the early Holocene. They are certainly not an old African population, and their language belongs to the Afro-Asiatic family
“The straits at Gibraltar and between Sicily and Africa were narrower for most of Neanderthal time, and Sinai less forbidding. So the non-Neanderthal people are from Sub-Saharan Africa, not all of Africa.”
The straits may have been narrower, but not necessarily easier to cross. Sicily as a matter of fact was not populated by any humans until c. 22,000 years ago when it was briefly connected to the mainland.
And neanderthals were no sailors. They never got to any islands not connected to the mainland, not even islands visible to the mainland. They didn’t colonize the British Isles during the previous interglacial for example. And they never got to Corsica/Sardinia, the Balearics, Sicily, Malta, Crete, Cyprus.
And Sinai (and the Negev) was not less forbidding during neanderthal times. If anything it was worse than now most of the time. I happen to be quite familiar with the Sinai and the Negev and under current climatic conditions it is actually one of the more forbidding desert areas of the world, though relatively small. There are worse ones, yes, but not many.
Incidentally Egypt has a rather good late Pleistocene archaeological record, and nary a trace of neanderthals has been found there.
If humans were so similar to neanderthals, then some new viruses in the neighborhood might have been lethal.
Israeli scientists thinks their meat-heavy diet and anatomy adapted thereto did them in:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/did-neanderthals-die-out-because-paleo-diet-180959066/?no-ist
New Oxford study claims sexually transmitted African diseases did them in:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/10/neanderthals-may-have-died-of-diseases-carried-by-humans-from-africa