We all enjoy stories about new discoveries, and it is these that tend to grab the news headlines, but there is another kind of story that gets far less coverage: those that contradict an earlier claim. In that category is the finding that our species – Homo sapiens – may not have been responsible for the extinction of our close relations, H neanderthalensis. According to previous thinking, we outcompeted Neanderthals because of our superior linguistic skills and tactical teamwork when hunting red deer and other large mammals. The migration of H sapiens into Europe c.60,000 years ago has been characterised as the beginning of the end for the ‘less intelligent’ Neanderthals, who lost out when faced with competition for increasingly scarce food resources at a time of challenging climate change.
The idea that Neanderthals were greatly inferior to us is increasingly difficult to sustain in the light of recent discoveries showing that archaic humans manufactured tar from birch bark to use as an adhesive for joining flint tips to wooden spear shafts – clear evidence of the ability to invent materials that do not occur naturally. Recent research has also shown that the abstract patterns engraved on the walls of La Roche-Cotard cave, on the north bank of the Loire River, in France, date from around 75,000 years ago and thus predate the arrival of H sapiens – further evidence of creative thinking on the part of Neanderthals (see CWA 121).
Now, a team of researchers based in Santander, Spain, and Cambridge, UK, has demonstrated that Neanderthals actually survived longest in the regions that both species shared. This apparently counter-intuitive conclusion was based on an analysis of environmental and climate data (see Science Advances: https://doi.org/ 10.1126/sciadv.adi4099) and comparing food abundance with the survival of each species.
Roman towns and cities: St Albans – Excavating the CA archive