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Study suggests demise did not coincide with climate cooling.
Whatever it was that sealed the fate of the Neanderthals, it looks unlikely to have been climate change. That is the verdict of a new study that used climate records from Venezuela to deduce what happened at the Neanderthals' last stand at the southern tip of Europe.
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Posted by on September 12, 2007
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Hello,
The Neanderthals were not killed by climate change, they main reason to explain the Neanderthal extinction was in their DNA.
It is possible that great fights by territorial powers, where homo sapiens sapiens, the most intelligent being, have more strategies battle, won battles decimating the men of Neanderthal.
But, the homo sapiens sapiens did not extinguish absolutely the race of Neanderthal, because they coexist together during thousands of years.
The main reason was that the genetic code of the Neanderthal race had arrived at its aim. As it was with dinosaurs, their DNA had come to and end, they were making sterile beings. The Neanderthal could not longer continue living as they had done it for thousands of years.
Its is not well known but… our DNA has two chains, one tell us how many years we can live as a person and the other one, tell us the time we have as a human race.
Regards,
JORGE DIXON
Posted by: Jorge Dixon | September 13, 2007 04:46 PM
This 2-chain DNA theory sounds quite amazing, and somewhat fanciful I have to say. Do you have any references for it? The number of species who have persisted essentially unchanged for millions of years tells me no species has a use-by date.
Of greater interest to me in the original article is the note that the swing from warm/wet climate to cold/dry climate has been seen to occur in a very short space of time. I find myself deeply troubled by the likelihood that we are on the cusp of swinging into a change to warm/wet right now. Hang on to your hats people.
Posted by: Gary Beilby | September 18, 2007 07:03 AM
There were once theories that rather than being extinct, the meeting of Neanderthals with earlier homo sapiens resulted in cross species mixing which resulted in modern homo sapiens. In such a case the current existing homo-sapiens who carry the mixed genetic information had some evolutionary advantage. This means that modern homo sapiens preserve in their genome some "Neanderthal genetic information".
Is there any recent support to these older theories?
Posted by: Rpahel Gorodetsky | September 18, 2007 12:18 PM
I don't have any reference to give, but I seem to recall that recent research established that modern homo sapiens did not have any Neanderthal DNA.
On the other hand, I remember reading about a computer model that supposedly demonstrated that if homo sapiens sapiens possessed the ability to produce "modern" language, and neanderthalis did not (which would be the case if its larynx had not lowered yet), that slight evolutionary advantage would be enough for sapiens sapiens to prevail, especially since they shared the same niche.
Posted by: Marc Andre Belanger | September 18, 2007 03:01 PM