They were our cousins, our hominid cousins. They looked like us, they walked like us, they may have even thought like us. So why did the Neanderthals disappear, while we Homo sapiens dug in and stayed?

Ever since the first Neanderthal bones were discovered 150 years ago in Germany’s Neander Valley, paleoanthropologists have sought to understand what could possibly have destroyed the once-thriving and widely dispersed species of prehistoric human. By most measures, the Neanderthals were the equal of our direct ancestors, the fully modern out-of-Africa characters often called Cro-Magnons, with whom the Neanderthals coexisted for thousands of years. Like our forebears, Neanderthals were supple sojourners, happily colonizing parts of Africa, Europe, and Asia. They stood upright, skillfully sculpted and wielded stone tools, and buried their dead with pomp and hope. They were slightly larger and more muscular than their Cro-Magnon counterparts, and their brains were bigger, too. Yet by about 30,000 years ago, the Neanderthals had vanished, leaving Cro-Magnons as the sole survivors of the tangled Hominina tribe. Moreover, while Neanderthals may well have been capable of interbreeding with Cro-Magnons, recent DNA analysis has revealed no signs that such Stone Age Capulet-Montague mergers occurred.

Some scientists have attributed the Neanderthals’ demise to chronic disease, pointing out that many Neanderthal skeletal remains show signs of arthritis and other bone disorders. Other people have wondered whether genocide was to blame. Perhaps the Cro-Magnons systematically exterminated their competitors, just as chimpanzees have been observed hunting down and killing every last member of a neighboring chimp troupe.

Another, more recent, hypothesis is that Homo sapiens outcompeted Homo neanderthalensis because of a difference in their economic systems. Reporting in the December issue of Current Anthropology, Steven Kuhn and Mary Stiner of the University of Arizona wrote that the archaeological record suggests all Neanderthals - male, female, adult, child - focused their efforts on “obtaining large terrestrial game.” In other words, they were all hunters. The Cro-Magnons, by contrast, appear to have divided labor along more or less sexual lines, with men doing most of the big-game killing, women and children gathering tubers and other plant foods, and everybody sharing the flesh and fruits of their efforts. By adopting this sort of specialization of labor, the researchers speculate, Homo sapiens likely proved more efficient and flexible than Neanderthals and were able to expand their population more rapidly.

In other words, at least according to this new theory put forward by Stiner and Kuhn, the Neanderthals weren’t felled by a pathogen or a primordial Slobodan Milosevic. They were done in by the bedrock family values of Fred and Wilma Flintstone.

Natalie Angier, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Canon

Return to Big Questions: http://www.wired.com/42

"Supple sojourners?" A sojourn is a brief stay yet you follow the phrase with "colonizing." Colonizing is permanent. You may want to consider a rewrite.

contributed by Scott Woelfel on Jan 29 10:52am

Uh, colonies are not necessarily populated by outsiders. Think India. It was a British colony. Not all of England had to move there. IOW, I read that the Neanderthals... they came, they conquered, they left, they returned. Returning so that the Neandarthal left behind to govern the colony could take a respite while a new Neanderthal governor settled in only to anxiously await his replacement during the next sojourn of Neanderthals. Or something like that. :)

contributed by soshull texxtor on Jan 31 12:21pm