What happened?
Why did Neanderthals disappear?
Well, recently there has been a lot of progress in reconstructing paleo-environments.
The new records have a much greater resolution.
What seems to be going on is that there are very great variations in temperature and climate
that are extremely abrupt and very, very high--very high in magnitude.
So what this means is that--is that the environment would be changing constantly.
So if you are relying on, you know, the environment around you for hunting and gathering
and so on, it’s not a very good--a very good time to be alive.
And I’m talking about very abruptly, this would be within a decade.
Now, Neanderthals went extinct, why did they go extinct at this particular time?
They had, in fact, survived previous glacial cycles that, you know, presumably were similar
and, you know, came out of them unscathed.
So what we think happened is that, in fact, modern humans had some advantage--
competitive advantage over Neanderthals in this very tough time.
It could be as simple as better clothing, or more efficient hunting,
or hunting of other animals, small animals, birds, things like that
which Neanderthals did not include in their diet very much.