Why Did Modern Humans Replace the Neanderthals?

[Pelican Press 0]

Why Did Modern Humans Replace the Neanderthals?

By Nicholas R. Longrich/The Conversation

Why did humans take over the world while our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, became extinct? It’s possible we were just smarter, but there’s surprisingly little evidence that’s true.

Neanderthals had 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, language and 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. They made 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

 and jewelry. They were smart, suggesting a curious possibility. Maybe the crucial differences weren’t at the individual level, but in our societies.

Two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, Europe and western Asia were Neanderthal lands.  ***** sapiens inhabited 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. Estimates vary but perhaps 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, modern humans migrated out of *******.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

 years ago Neanderthals disappeared from Asia and Europe, replaced by humans. Their slow, inevitable 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

 suggests humans had some advantage, but not what it was.

Anthropologists once saw Neanderthals as 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. But recent archaeological finds show they rivalled us in intelligence.

Neanderthal hand axes, Aisne, France. (Metropolitan Museum of Art/

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

)

Neanderthals 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. They were deadly hunters, taking big game like mammoths and woolly rhinos, and small animals like 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

.

They gathered plants, seeds and shellfish. Hunting and foraging all those species demanded deep understanding of nature.

Neanderthals also had a sense of beauty, making beads and 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. They were spiritual people, 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

 found inside caves may be Neanderthal shrines. Like modern hunter-gatherers, Neanderthal lives were probably steeped in superstition and magic; their skies full of gods, the caves inhabited by ancestor-spirits.

Then there’s the fact  ***** sapiens and Neanderthals 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. We weren’t that different. But we met Neanderthals many times, over many millennia, always with the same result. They disappeared. We remained.

The Hunter-gatherer Society

It may be that the key differences were less at the individual level than at the societal level. It’s impossible to understand humans in isolation, any more than you can understand a honeybee without considering its colony. We prize our individuality, but our survival is tied to larger social groups, like a bee’s fate depends on the colony’s survival.

Modern hunter-gatherers provide our best guess at how early humans and Neanderthals lived. People like the Namibia’s 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

 and Tanzania’s 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

 gather families into 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. The bands combine into a loosely organized tribe of a thousand people or more.

These tribes lack hierarchical structures, but they’re linked by shared language and religion, marriages, kinships and friendships. Neanderthal societies may have been similar but with one crucial difference: smaller social groups.

Tight-knit Tribes

What points to this is evidence that Neanderthals had 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

.

In small populations, genes are easily lost. If one person in ten carries a gene for curly hair, then in a ten-person band, one ****** could remove the gene from the population. In a band of fifty, five people would carry the gene – multiple backup copies. So over time, small groups tend to lose genetic variation, ending up with fewer genes.

In 2022, DNA was recovered from 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

 of 11 Neanderthals found in a ***** in the Altai Mountains of Siberia. Several individuals were related, including a father and a daughter – they were from a single band. And they showed low genetic diversity.

Because we inherit two sets of chromosomes – one from our mother, one from our father – we carry two copies of each gene. Often, we have two different versions of a gene. You might get a gene for blue eyes from your mother, and one for brown eyes from your father.

But the Altai Neanderthals often had one version of each gene. As the study reports, that low diversity suggests they lived in small bands – probably averaging just 20 people.

It’s possible Neanderthal anatomy favored small groups. Being robust and muscular, Neanderthals were heavier than us. So each Neanderthal needed more food, meaning the 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

 fewer Neanderthals than  ***** sapiens.

And Neanderthals may have mainly 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. Meat-eaters would get fewer calories from the land than people who ate meat and plants, again leading to smaller populations.

Group Size Matters

If humans lived in ******* groups than Neanderthals, it could have given us advantages.

Neanderthals, strong and skilled with 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

 were likely good fighters. Lightly built humans probably countered by 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

 to ******* at range.

But even if Neanderthals and humans were equally dangerous in battle, if humans also had a numeric advantage, they could bring more fighters and absorb more losses.

Big societies have other, subtler advantages. Larger bands have more brains. More brains to solve problems, remember lore about animals and plants, and techniques for crafting tools and sewing clothing. Just as big groups have higher genetic diversity, they’ll have higher diversity of ideas.

And more people means more connections. Network connections increase exponentially with network size, following 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. A 20-person band has 190 possible connections between members, while 60 people have 1770 possible connections.

Metcalfe’s law. (Nick Longrich/

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

)

Information flows through these connections: news about people and movements of animals; toolmaking techniques; and words, songs and myths. Plus, the group’s behavior becomes increasingly complex.

Consider ants. Individually, ants aren’t smart. But interactions between millions of ants lets colonies make elaborate nests, forage for food and ***** animals many times an ant’s size. Likewise, human groups do things no one person can – design buildings and cars, write elaborate computer programs, ****** wars, run companies and countries.

Humans aren’t unique in having big brains (whales and elephants have these) or in having huge social groups (zebras and wildebeest form huge herds). But we’re unique in combining them.

To 

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, no man – and no Neanderthal – is an island. We’re all part of something larger. And throughout history, humans formed larger and larger social groups: bands, tribes, cities, nation states, international alliances.

It may be then that an ability to build large social structures gave  ***** sapiens the edge, against nature, and other hominin species.

This article was originally published under the title ‘

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

’ by

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

on

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, and has been republished under a Creative Commons License.

Top image: Rock art showing a hunter-gatherer ritual dance; Kondoa, Tanzania. Source: Nick Longrich/

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

neanderthals, ***** sapiens, Extinction, hominins
#Modern #Humans #Replace #Neanderthals

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up