Neanderthal's and Early Modern Humans

The one of the left is a picture of what a human skull looks like, the one on the right is what a Neandertal skull would have looked like.

This weekend I wrote an essay on evolution and religion and how they can coexist. I was thinking about using this as my big essay for this term although I have already turned my rough draft essay on global warming in. Due to this, I decided to read a little bit further into evolution and modern humans. One of the most fascinating things about evolution is that it supports the belief of Neanderthal people. Neanderthal’s are basically known as the cousin of early humans. At some point thousands of years ago we had a common ancestor with them. They looked very similar to early modern humans and are today extinct.

How did these Neanderthal’s come to extinction? This is a question that puzzles many scientists to this day. One possibility is that early modern humans killed them off. Possible evidence of this is found on the Neanderthal named Shanidar 3. Through very much testing, Shanidar 3 appears to have been killed when a spear punctured his rib cage. At this time period, spears were only being used by early modern humans. Now of course if this is how the Neanderthal died, it is just one scenario of this type of encounter. The main motive for this killing would have most likely been to eat the Neanderthal. According to Discover magazine early modern humans began to migrate from Africa to Europe, where the Neanderthal’s were living, 50,000 years ago. Then around 30,000 years ago the Neanderthal’s became extinct. The possibility that early modern humans killed the Neanderthal’s isn’t the only possibility though.

Some scientists believe there was a much more peaceful ending to the population of the Neanderthal’s though. Some evidence shows that Neanderthal’s and early modern human’s mated. It could be that because the Neanderthal population was so small compared to the humans they were eventually absorbed into the human population through this mating. This made me think, is it possible that some of us still have Neanderthal blood running through our veins? The studying of human and Neanderthal DNA has shown that there was very minimal interbreeding between the two closely related species.

Another possibility that to me seems the most likely is that over time the Neanderthal population died out from simply not being able to adjust to their climate. The fact was that there were far fewer Neanderthal’s than there were early modern humans. When there are far fewer of a species to begin with it often times makes it difficult for them to survive when a major climate change occurs. In fact, evidence shows that around the time of the end of the Paleolithic area extreme climate changes occurred. This would have been around the time the Neanderthal’s became extinct. A major weakness of the Neanderthal’s was that they relied heavily on the hunting big game while the early modern humans relied on hunting and gathering. If the big game became scarce for long periods at a time, the humans would be able to live off the gathering they did but the Neanderthal’s would most likely die off.

Here is a link of the article I wrote about in Discover Magazine.