The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and We Survived

368 Pages·2010·1.91 MB·English

by  Clive Finlayson

THE HUMANS WHO WENT EXTINCT
Clive Finlayson is Director of the Gibraltar Museum and adjunct professor at the
University of Toronto. He is an evolutionary ecologist with a DPhil from the
University of Oxford. For the past fifteen years he has combined his ecological
work with birds with leading an international multidisciplinary project that has
focused on excavations of the Pleistocene caves in Gibraltar, especially
Gorham’s Cave, recently confirmed as the site of the last Neanderthals on the
planet. Clive is a leading exponent of the relationship between climate change,
ecological change, and human evolution. His views have been summarised in his
book Neanderthals and Modern Humans: An Ecological and Evolutionary
Perspective (CUP, 2004) and numerous research papers.
THE HUMANS WHO WENT
EXTINCT
WHY NEANDERTHALS DIED OUT AND WE SURVIVED
Clive Finlayson
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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First published in paperback 2010
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Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Finlayson,
Clive, 1955–
The humans who went extinct: why neanderthals died out and we survived /
Clive Finlayson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978–0–19–923918–4 (hardback)
1. Neanderthals. 2. Human evolution. 3. Social evolution. I. Title.
GN285.F54 2009
303.4—dc22 2009020070
Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd., St Ives plc ISBN 978–0–19–923918–4 (Hbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–923919–1 (Pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Note for the paperback edition
Prologue: When Climate Changed the Course of History
1. The Road to Extinction Is Paved with Good Intentions
2. Once We Were Not Alone
3. Failed Experiments
4. Stick to What You Know Best
5. Being in the Right Place at the Right Time
6. If Only….
7. Africa in Europe—A Mediterranean Serengeti
8. One Small Step for Man …
9. Forever Opportunists
10. The Pawn Turned Player
Epilogue: Children of Chance
Endnotes
Index
List of Illustrations
1. Time frame covered in this book
2. Planet of the Apes
3. Pit of the Bones (Sima de los Huesos)
4. Savannahstan
5. Lake and dunes at Doñana
6. Mid-latitude belt
7. Branches of human evolution
8. Niah in Sarawak
9. Mammoth steppe
10. Forbes quarry skull
11. Gorham’s today and Gorham’s reconstruction
12. Dolni Vĕstonice
Preface
WHY did the Neanderthals go extinct? I often get asked this question when I
give a public lecture. The answer most people expect is that our own kind, those
referred to as Modern Humans by palaeoanthropologists and simply as
Ancestors, or Homo sapiens, in this book, wiped them out; it could have been
overt aggression or a more subtle competition but eliminate them we did. Behind
these assertions is the perception that ‘our people’ were cleverer than ‘the
others’, those ape-like Neanderthals. So it is obvious that when we both met
there could only have been one outcome. We are here after all and they are not.
I started to question this dogma almost a decade ago now and I have become
increasingly dissatisfied with this simplistic explanation. I started by chasing the
evidence and found that there was none. When I challenged the defenders of this
view at conferences the best answer that I got was that in all archaeological sites
that had been studied H. sapiens remains and artefacts always appeared above,
and therefore later than, Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) ones so it was
clear that H. sapiens had come in and kicked H. neanderthalensis out. When I
suggested that the same evidence could be interpreted to mean that H. sapiens
were only able to enter these caves once the Neanderthals had gone, and by
implication that the Neanderthals had actually kept them out, there was silence.
The point is that sometimes one piece of evidence can be interpreted in more
than one way, in the process raising doubts about uncorroborated assertions. The
staunch crusaders of the idea that H. sapiens actively replaced H.
neanderthalensis continue to cling onto this idea in the face of increasing
evidence against it. But that is part of the process that is science.
Who were the Neanderthals? They were humans who separated from our
lineage around half-a-million years or so ago (the precise time is uncertain). In
this book I will treat the two, for convenience, as separate species (Neanderthals,
H. neanderthalensis and Ancestors, H. sapiens) since they reperesent two
distinct lineages that appear to have been geographically isolated—H.
neanderthalensis in Eurasia and H. sapiens in Africa—for a considerable time.
But this should not be taken to mean that I am convinced that the degree of
distinctiveness between the two merits giving them such a status. Other authors
consider them subspecies of H. sapiens (H. sapiens neanderthalensis and H.
sapiens sapiens) but the acid test—did they interbreed and therefore behave as a
single biological species?—is hard to show from fossils.
Since the separation of the two lineages, our people and the Neanderthals
developed differences that probably had to do with their lifestyles. The
Neanderthals became a tough, well-built, people. They had large brains, even
bigger than ours, and they lived across Europe and northern Asia as far as
eastern Siberia and perhaps even into Mongolia and China. They could probably
speak and they were highly adaptable; in some places they ambushed deer and
even larger animals while in others they beachcombed or gathered pine nuts.
Rarely would they have taken on the largest animals—the image of the
Neanderthal taking on a woolly mammoth is probably false. They probably
scavenged these giants instead, chasing off wolves and hyaenas in the process.
The Neanderthal lifestyle worked for tens of thousand of years.
Our ancestors came from Africa but the routes that they followed, now much
clearer since genetic markers have been used to trace the pathways, were not
straightforward; we will look at these in this book. There are enigmas waiting to
be resolved along the way: why did these people reach Australia almost 15
thousand years before they got into Europe which is much closer to Africa?
Were the Neanderthals keeping them out? It is now quite clear that the big entry
of H. sapiens into Europe and across Siberia started off in Central Asia: most
Europeans, Native Americans, and eastern Asians come from this stock.
There are also tantalizing glimpses that suggest increasingly that other people
may also have been around. Why should it only have been Neanderthals and our
ancestors? As we begin to understand the complex panorama of prehistoric
humans in greater detail we may be surprised to find that the diversity of
peoples, from populations to species, was much greater than the simple H.
sapiens–neanderthalensis dichotomy which we have inherited. The discovery of
the Hobbits, H. floresiensis, on Flores is the tip of the iceberg.
But we still have to answer the question ‘Why are we here and not the
Neanderthals?’ I am afraid that my answer is not as simple as ‘we clubbed them
on the head.’ The answer is actually a series of answers and, even though we are
much closer today than we have ever been to resolving the question, these
answers are incomplete. At one level the drastic climate changes that hit the
parts of the world where the Neanderthals lived after 70 thousand years ago
decimated and fragmented their world.
Because the stocky body of the Neanderthal had been interpreted as an
adaptation to cold climate, the idea that the cold had a negative impact on them
was not given serious consideration. But body proportions are not only linked to
climate: in the case of the Neanderthals it had more to do with their hunting style
and, in any case, when conditions were really cold in northern Eurasia the
Neanderthals were simply not there anyway. For over 40 thousand years constant
attrition by cold environments took its toll and it is to their credit that the
Neanderthals held on for so long. In comparison, our people never had it so
rough for such a length of time. The last Neanderthal populations, scattered in
southern Iberia, Crimea, the Caucasus, and other remote haunts, were like
endangered populations of giant pandas or tigers of today. They slowly vanished,
one by one. By then they had become ‘living dead’ and the stories of the
disappearance of each nucleus were probably very different: disease, inbreeding,
competition, random fluctuations in their numbers.
Huge progress has been made in recent years, particularly in the field of
genetics and the study of ancient DNA. We know now that Neanderthals were