Neanderthals: Done in by Competition, Not Climate

Jan. 8, 2009 -- Climate change has become the default scapegoat for nearly every extinction on Earth lately. But a new study lets climate off the hook for at least one dramatic event: The disappearance of the Neanderthals from Europe about 35,000 years ago.

Scientists have long debated what caused the demise of this human-like species. One camp argues that the Neanderthals fell victim to a dramatic cooling of the environment. The other view holds that prehistoric humans squeezed the Neanderthals out.

"There have been dozens and dozens of articles on one side or the other," said William Banks, an archaeologist at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Bordeaux.


Neanderthal Life Forced Cannibalism

Neanderthals had different ethnic groups, often suffered from starvation, and probably practiced cannibalism. That’s the news from a recent study of the skeletal remains from eight Neanderthals who lived 43,000 years ago in northwest Spain.

The findings, published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, raise questions about Neanderthal lifestyle. Why, for instance, would they have resorted to cannibalism? What harsh conditions caused the wear and tear evident on surviving bones?

There are two possible reasons why Neanderthals would have dined on their dead, according to lead author Antonio Rosas, a scientist in the Department of Paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.

"One is that they needed to eat whatever was at hand, including human flesh, because ecological conditions for their survivorship, such as extreme cold weather and no meat from hunting, were really hard," Rosas told Discovery News. The other possibility, she said, is that "this was done in the context of something we may think of as symbolic."

Rosas suggested the virtual absence of animal remains at the site — a cave called El Sidrón — may point either to ritual killings or unsuccessful hunting. Neanderthals are thought to have subsisted primarily on meat.

The eight Neanderthals studied ranged in age from infancy to young adulthood. Their teeth revealed that tooth growth often stopped abruptly due to illness or malnutrition. Adolescence in general appears to have been a particularly hard time, possibly due to separation from parents and the resulting need for self-sufficiency.

Cut marks associated with butchery were found on some of the remains, particularly those of the younger individuals.

The skeletal remains also revealed that these Neanderthals possessed a different bone structure than individuals found elsewhere in Europe. It appears that Neanderthals fell into at least two basic ethnic groups that coincided with their north-south geographical distribution.

Southern Neanderthals from the Iberian Peninsula, the Balkans, the Middle East and Italy had broader and shorter faces than northern Neanderthals from populations living north of the Pyrenees, the Alps, portions of Asia and central and eastern Europe, Rosas and his team determined.

Scientists are now debating whether interbreeding with modern humans occurred and why all of these Neanderthal groups appear to have gone extinct.

"It does look, from a variety of data, that Neanderthals were subject to episodes of extreme scarcity, with which their cultural and social systems sometimes couldn’t cope," said Steven Kuhn, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona.

He added, "There could also be a link between boom-and-bust subsistence and occasional cannibalism."

Kuhn and colleague Mary Stiner theorize that modern humans better divided labor along the lines of gender and age. Instead of everyone working toward the next big kill, women and children in early modern human groups devised other food-obtaining strategies, such as gathering fruits and nuts.

Such diversification underlies our success, even today.

"It is clear that the kinds of cooperative, diversified economies practiced by recent hunter gatherers are ‘underwritten by’ our sophisticated cognitive and communicative abilities," Kuhn explained.

"That’s what allows people to negotiate and maintain their complex patterns of dependency and cooperation, keep each other in line, etc., but whether the cognitive development is cause or consequence isn’t clear to us."