Extinction: Maybe Cro-Magnon Wiped Out Neanderthals After All

By Hank Campbell | May 20th 2020 10:46 AM

Why is Homo neanderthalensis gone while Homo sapiens have bent the world to our will?

In recent years, there has been speculation that climate change wiped out Neanderthal people, or interbreeding with us, since many of us have DNA shared by Neanderthals (we also share 60 percent of our DNA with a banana) but a new paper affirms the earliest belief about survival of the fitter, commonly called survival of the fittest; competition between Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal. And Neanderthals lost.

Cro-Magnon became a common name for homo sapiens when the first fossil to be recognized as belonging to our own species was discovered in 1868 at the Cro-Magnon archaeological site outside Les Eyzies, France. Homo neanderthalensis, commonly called Neanderthals, were identified from a find in the west German Neandertal Valley 12 years earlier. The narrative immediately sprang up that they were precursor 'cave men' to us in a straight evolutionary line but now it is recognized that they were a separate branch.

In the 20th century extinction hypotheses for the end of Neanderthals gave way to climate shifts but that is tricky because 90,000 of every 100,000 years in recent geological history have been ice ages, so Neanderthals survived at least three worse than the one they died during. Then there was speculation that they never went extinct at all, but just became part of us.

More:
https://www.science20.com/hank_campbell/extinction_maybe_cromagnon_wiped_out_neanderthals_after_all-248069