> 2010/6/16 paul stenquist <[email protected]>: > > But it's politically correct to assume that the nasty and violent > humans > > caused the demise of the gentle and peace-loving Neanderthals. >
I don't think it's a matter of political correctness, but of people retaining a belief that was current in the scientific community for a long time (Man the Hunter) and was used to explain this. The imagery was so powerful (see 2001 A Space Odyssey, for example) that the last 40-50 years of research has not entirely removed it from the popular imagination. [...] > > As BobW pointed to, combat is not the only way. Competitive exclusion > and parasite/disease resistance would do nicely too. For all we know > the neanderthals could have been particularly susceptible to a disease > transferred by, as you say, procreative mingling. it's also entirely possible that modern people had nothing at all to do with the extinction of the Neandertals. They may have been on their way out anyway, as a result of changes to the environment to which they could not adapt. At the same time, modern humans were able to exploit the changing environment, which is why we entered Europe at the same time as the Neandertals were expiring. One event did not necessarily cause the other - they may have had the same cause. Remember that however pleasant it is now, for much of modern human existence Europe was a remote and impossible place for us to get to and to live in. Depending on how the evidence is interpreted, we may have got to Australia as much 30,000 years before we got to Europe! Yet the Neandertals thrived in those conditions. It should not be much of a surprise to find that when conditions had softened enough for us, the Neandertals came under environmental stress. I am on holiday in the Cevennes next week and the week following - I hope to be able to visit some sites where Cro-Magnon finds were made in the 19th C, including la caverne de l'homme mort, where some 50 individuals were found, most of whom had been trepanned. They were probably early Pentax shooters. Bob -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
