According to a flurry of news stories this week, a series of massive volcanic eruptions were to blame for the extinction of the Neanderthals.
Discovery News sums the story up nicely:
At least three volcanic eruptions about 40,000 years ago devastated Neanderthals' western Asian and European homelands, spurring a rapid demise of these humanlike hominids... Modern humans survived because they lived in Africa and on the tip of southwestern Asia at that time, safely outside the range of volcanic ash clouds.
The paper isn't online yet so we can't judge it, but we don't need to see it to know that this is just one of many possible explanations.
The volcano idea stems from archaeologist Lubov Golovanova of the ANO Laboratory of Prehistory in St. Petersburg, Russia, and will be published in the October issue of Current Anthropology.
Golovanova has spent over 20 years studying the Mezmaiskaya Cave in south-west Russia. Neanderthals lived there for many years before disappearing, seemingly quite abruptly, 40,000 years ago.
After analysing the soil from the cave, Golovanova concluded that at least two volcanic eruptions had devastated the area, coating the ground with ash and cooling the climate.
The effects would have been cruel. As National Geographic puts it, the Neanderthals would have found themselves "dying slowly in a cold and desolate landscape bereft of food sources."
It certainly wouldn't be the first time a volcano influenced the course of human evolution. The Toba supervolcano, which went off in Indonesia 74,000 years ago, may have driven the human race to the brink of extinction.
But the volcanoes can't be the whole story. Neanderthals survived in Gibraltar until 28,000 years ago, 12,000 years after the eruptions.
What's more, there are a great many other possible reasons for the Neanderthals' extinction, including:
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Low population density, which would have made them vulnerable
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Lack of the technological knowhow to cope with the ice age
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Or they might have been too well-adapted to the cold, and couldn't adapt when the climate warmed again
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Modern humans developed free trade, allowing individuals and groups to specialise in different tasks and outcompete the Neanderthals
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Neanderthals may have had too narrow a diet, making them less adaptable
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They were stoned to death by modern humans
Many of these are quite well-documented, though it's not clear how severe their effects were.
The truth, of course, is often messy: quite probably there were several factors that drove our cousins extinct.
Author: Michael Marshall | Source: New Scientist [September 28, 2010]