The emerging fate of the Neandertals

For nearly a century, anthropologists have been debating the relationship of Neandertals to modern humans. Central to the debate is whether Neandertals contributed directly or indirectly to the ancestry of the early modern humans that succeeded them.

As this discussion has intensified in the past decades, it has become the central research focus of Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Trinkaus has examined the earliest modern humans in Europe, including specimens in Romania, Czech Republic and France. Those specimens, in Trinkaus' opinion, have shown obvious Neandertal ancestry.

In an article appearing the week of April 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Trinkaus has brought together the available data, which shows that early modern humans did exhibit evidence of Neandertal traits.

"When you look at all of the well dated and diagnostic early modern European fossils, there is a persistent presence of anatomical features that were present among the Neandertals but absent from the earlier African modern humans," Trinkaus said. "Early modern Europeans reflect both their predominant African early modern human ancestry and a substantial degree of admixture between those early modern humans and the indigenous Neandertals."

This analysis, along with a number of considerations of human genetics, argues that the fate of the Neandertals was to be absorbed into modern human groups. Just as importantly, it also says that the behavioral difference between the groups were small. They saw each other as social equals.

I have always understood the Neanderthals as being built along the lines of football players, boxers, or wrestlers. Their bones were denser than those of modern man means they couldn�t possibly swim. Some say their brains were also dense. That is cruel for they evolved to suit their environment in robust activities like big game hunting. They adapted to the early European conditions, where the big game mostly lived. They died out at the beginning of the last major Ice Age for they were caught out by severe climate change.

Like the animals they hunted they could not go too far north or freeze, or too far south or boil. In the warmer southern climate a more gracile species of human arose, who did not rely on mammoth chops for dinner and even ate grass for supper. This was modern man and we still eat grass as wheat, rice, barley etc. The human appendix is said to come from a time when we ate �grass� in a more unprocessed state.

We graciles began to extend northwards following the grasslands and the protein packed game that fed on it. We ran into the Neanderthals and turf wars erupted over hunting grounds. They were much stronger, but not as smart and were forced further north into the onset of the Ice Age where no type of human had any chance of survival. Pockets of former tribes remained in the south but the genetic pools of breeding families were pushed too far apart to make a comeback and so they died out.    

It is not out of the question to suggest some of the Neanderthal race may have evolved a more gracile form quite apart from their more primitive brothers and sisters. Then the �out of Africa� humans obviously did not want to stay where they began. It could be suggested the majority of Neanderthals did once live in a lost land in the North Sea area, one of the largest hunting grounds in the world before it sank making any evidence of their long inhabitation unavailable. The coming of the Ice Age forced northern evolved humans southwards into the inhabitation of the swamps and forests of Europe before it was covered with glaciers, but the Southern evolved types were moving northwards making clashes inevitable.

Would they have bred together? Perhaps, but humans are most sensitive to smell in gaining sexual arousal. Different forms of diet and toilet behaviour were used as an attraction to the act. In Pre-ice-age days they knew they were different for their physical shape was obvious. The types of human would have been more inclined to fight, or better still stay away from each other, rather than make love. Then about physical shape, if the Neanderthals were naturally stronger that means their sexual organs were that much larger and having inter-racial sex would have been uncomfortable and not very satisfying.