TOOLS and GENES. Last July, was published in Science an article where the authors suggest that "....numerical supremacy (modern humans) alone must have been a powerful, if not overwhelming, factor in direct demographic and territorial competition between modern humans and Neandertals". The authors conducted a new statistical analysis of the archaeological evidence around 40,000 ya in European sites. They also mentioned that improved hunting and food processing techniques could have played a role during the replacement. Finally, Mellars and French pointed out that "A range of climatic and associated environmental factors could have played a further, critical role in this demographic replacement and extinction process".
The idea that the neanderthal population size was smaller than we thought once is not new. A genetic study published not too long ago in Science mentioned that "....data suggest that the long-term effective population size of Neandertals was smaller than that of modern humans and extant great apes"
So, replacement is back.....
Professor Crespo,
ReplyDeleteI agree with the Science article that the numbers for anatomically modern humans versus Neanderthals played a critical factor in replacing Neanderthals. However, I began to ask why then the Neanderthals didn’t form larger cooperative groups to begin with. This led me to search for a possible answer as to what allowed our ancestors to coalesce into significantly larger groups compared to Neanderthals.
The authors of the article you cited in Science, Mellars and French suggested that improved hunting strategies may have aided modern humans. This is where I want to point out a common idea I recently read about in Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe (Bingham and Souza 2009). In chapter 11, they specifically state that a new weapon system called the atlatl (most likely used as a hunting tool first then adapted for law enforcement and warfare) allowed modern humans to form larger groups due to the greater range of cost-effective management of individual conflicts of interest or law enforcement within that group. For a better understanding of this view as to the possible displacement of Neandertals by our ancestors, you may want to read the authors’ comments on exactly this issue at:
http://www.deathfromadistance.com/posts/research/2010/05/comment-on-newly-released-neandertal-genome-sequence-neandertals-and-moderns-%E2%80%93-fellow-members-of-a-common-humanity/
I’d like to hear your thoughts on this theoretical view.
Tian:
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment and for bringing Bingham and Souza's idea of "social revolution" as one of the main factor when explaining (or trying to) the success of modern humans. Some colleagues will argue that there is some genetic component behind this new "social cooperative behavior". Maybe the genetic differences between neanderthals and modern humans were not due to specific mutations or DNA sequences but how genes were expressed...
Said that, I must read Bingham and Souza's book!