After all, Neanderthal DNA lives on in people living today, the result of ancient trysts and some helpful genes. Sarah Sloat. It all had to do with a skull.
So what killed off the Neanderthals? It's possible that it was one thing, but more likely a combination of many. Here are 5 theories:. Climate change A study argues that climate change played a role in their extinction. Analysis of stalagmites revealed that between 44, and 40, years ago, there was a series of extremely cold and dry spells.
When compared to archeological records, there was an absence of Neanderthal tools dating to those harsh weather periods. This suggests that the European Neanderthal population was much smaller during cold periods, and could explain why they eventually died off. Inbreeding A common thread through extinction theories is that Neanderthal populations were small.
This drove close relatives to mate. The pace at which stalagmites formed is the first significant result of this study. Researchers found out that Apulian stalagmites showed a consistent pace of dripping in the last and previous ice ages. This means that no abrupt change in climate happened during the millennia under investigation. A drought would have been visible in the stalagmites. Among all the stalagmites that were analysed, one was particularly relevant.
According to dating, this stalagmite formed between , and 27, years ago. This stalagmite represents the longest timeline of the last ice age in the western Mediterranean and in Europe. Moreover, this stalagmite did not show any trace of abrupt changes in climate that might have caused Neanderthals' extinction.
This means that significant changes in flora and thus in climate did not happen. The results seem to show that the dramatic changes in the climate of the last ice age had a different impact on the Mediterranean area than in continental Europe and Greenland.
This may rule out the hypothesis that climate changes are responsible for Neanderthals dying out. How do we explain their extinction after a few millennia of coexistence with Homo sapiens? Stefano Benazzi, a palaeontologist at the University of Bologna and one of the authors of the paper, provides an answer to this question.
Other scholars also participated in the study: from the University of Innsbruck Austria where the isotopic analyses were carried out, from Melbourne University Australia and Xi'an Jiaotong University China , that carried out the radiometric dating.
Grotte di Castellana, the Apulian Speleology Association and, for the major part, local speleology groups provided funding for this study. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Science News. What happened? Pobiner: It is hard to know exactly why many species are on the verge of extinction now, let alone species in the deep past that are already gone.
However, we can assume some of the same basic ecological processes driving animals to extinction today are part of the puzzle. In the case of Neanderthals, we think competition and changes to their habitat due to climate change were two of the main factors. Neanderthals were fairly specialized to hunt large, Ice Age animals.
When climates changed and some of those animals went extinct, the Neanderthals may have been more vulnerable to starvation. We also think Homo sapiens had a competitive edge over Neanderthals.
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