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BY JJ BAILEY
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A pair of researchers have come up with a new theory. They say Neanderthals were pushed to extinction some 40,000 years ago when they were simply outnumbered and outclassed. If you’re wondering who’s responsible, just take a look in the mirror.
“The arrival of modern humans coincided with the appearance of elaborate cave paintings, decorative stones and beads, and imported shells, suggesting Homo. sapiens had a more complex society than the Neanderthals.”
The theory was proposed by Paul Mellars, professor emeritus of prehistory and human evolution at Cambridge University, and his colleague, Jennifer French. According to the Mellars...
“Faced with this kind of competition, the Neanderthals seem to have retreated initially into more marginal and less attractive regions of the continent and eventually, within a space of at most a hundred thousand years, for their populations to have declined to extinction”
Southwestern France has long had the reputation for high concentrations of early human remains, so that’s where the pair headed. While they found evidence that we may have pushed our early cousins out the door, an article in Discover says, we didn’t leave them behind entirely.
“A series of scientific and technological breakthroughs have altered much of our fundamental understanding of human evolution. In the new view, the path to Homo sapiens was amazingly dilatory and indirect...Today 1 to 4 percent of the genome for populations living outside of Africa is Neanderthal.”
Discover quoted paleoanthropologist William Jungers as saying we may be special, but homo sapiens aren’t the only human experiment in the course of evolution. If you don’t like the idea of being an experiment, hang on. Daily Mail says it just might be the reason we are still around today.
It has long been thought that homo sapiens interbred, and one researcher says- that’s the key to our continuing survival. According to Stanford University’s Peter Parham, a little interspecies lovin’ has gone a long way.
“HLAs contain some of the most variable genes in the population - known as alleles - which allow the body to react to both established and new diseases. And while the humans that left Africa probably only carried a small number of the HLA alleles, the research indicates they picked up new ones from the Neanderthals they interbred with as they established themselves in other parts of the world.”
According to Mellars and French, when our ancient relatives moved into Europe, we outnumbered Neanderthals 10-to-1.
Transcript by Newsy.
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