Opinion

• Book information
• The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals died out and we survived by Clive Finlayson
• Published by: Oxford University Press
• Price: £16.99/$29.95

ONCE upon a time, a race of cavemen ruled Europe and Asia, then mysteriously vanished, leaving little but bones and stone tools behind.

The history of the Neanderthals isn't a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, but much of what has been written about the ancient human species may as well be, says evolutionary ecologist Clive Finlayson in his informative monograph.

Take their disappearance, which a team led by Finlayson has pinpointed to the rock of Gibraltar, between 28,000 and 24,000 years ago. Since the discovery of the first Neanderthal bones in Belgium in 1829, anthropologists have proposed any number of explanations for their extinction.

Some said Neanderthals were too dim-witted to survive climatic upheaval or the arrival of our ancestors from Africa. Others contended that their diet - big mammals that were also becoming rare - did them in, while Homo sapiens's more catholic diet gave them the edge to survive. Some even argued that Neanderthals didn't go extinct at all, but interbred with H. sapiens.

None of these just-so stories quite add up, Finlayson says. There is no clear indication that Neanderthals were any less intelligent than H. sapiens, and genetic evidence has shown that they share with humans key changes in Foxp2, a gene involved in speech and language. The distinction between Neanderthal and human technology isn't as clear-cut as palaeoanthropologists sometimes suggest, and Neanderthals hunted smaller game and seafood where it was available. Meanwhile, a first-draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome offers no sign that they contributed to our gene pool.

So why did Neanderthals go extinct? Finlayson argues that it was a deadly combination of bad luck and climate change. They were a species caught in the wrong place at the wrong time in a rapidly changing world. "By the time the classic Neanderthals had emerged," Finlayson laments, "they were already a people doomed to extinction."

A series of ice ages ate away the forest habitats where Neanderthals and their predecessors, Homo heidelbergensis, made a living sneaking up on big game. As their numbers declined, those who remained took refuge in warmer parts of Europe, nearer the Mediterranean. But a final drop in temperatures that began around 50,000 years ago made even this meagre living unsustainable.

Finlayson does not rule out the possibility that Neanderthals and H. sapiens met. Neanderthals, our ancestors and other archaic human species probably overlapped. But such contact was unlikely to play a pivotal part in the Neanderthal's disappearance and our dominance, which Finlayson chalks up largely to luck. That may not be a fairy tale, but at least, for us, there's a happy ending.

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