By NICHOLAS WADE Published: December 5, 2006 New York Times
A new explanation for the demise of the Neanderthals, the stockily built human species that occupied Europe until the arrival of modern humans 45,000 years ago, has been proposed by two anthropologists at the University of Arizona.
Unlike modern humans, who had developed a versatile division of labor between men and women, the entire Neanderthal population seems to have been engaged in a single main occupation, the hunting of large game, the scientists, Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, say in an article posted online yesterday in Current Anthropology.
Because modern humans exploited the environment more efficiently, by having men hunt large game and women gather small game and plant foods, their populations would have outgrown those of the Neanderthals.
The Neanderthals endured for about 100,000 years, despite a punishing way of life. They preyed on the large animals that flourished in Europe in the ice age like bison, deer, gazelles and wild horses. But there is no evidence that they knew of bows and arrows. Instead, they used stone-tipped spears.
Hunting large game at close range is perilous, and Neanderthal skeletons bear copious fractures. Dr. Kuhn and Dr. Stiner argue that Neanderthal women and children took part in the dangerous hunts, probably as beaters and blockers of exit routes.
Their argument, necessarily indirect, begins with the human hunter-gatherer societies, almost all of which have a division of labor between the sexes.
At sites occupied by modern humans from 45,000 to 10,000 years ago, a period known as the Upper Paleolithic, there is good evidence of different occupations, from small animal and bird remains, as well as the bone awls and needles used to make clothes. It seems reasonable to assume that these activities were divided between men and women, as is the case with modern foraging peoples.
But Neanderthal sites include no bone needles, no small animal remains and no grinding stones for preparing plant foods. So what did Neanderthal women do all day?
Their skeletons are so robustly built that it seems improbable that they just sat at home looking after the children, the anthropologists write. More likely, they did the same as the men, with the whole population engaged in bringing down large game.
The meat of large animals yields a rich payoff, but even the best hunters have unlucky days. The modern humans of the Upper Paleolithic, with their division of labor and diversified food sources, would have been better able to secure a continuous food supply. Nor were they putting their reproductive core — women and children — at great risk.
David Pilbeam, a paleoanthropologist at Harvard, said the Arizona researchers’ article was “very stimulating and thoughtful” and seemed to be the first to propose a mechanism for why Neanderthal populations declined.
Dr. Stiner said the division of labor between the sexes was likely to have arisen in a tropical environment. Indeed, it may have provided the demographic impetus for modern humans to expand out of Africa, she said.
A rival hypothesis proposed by Richard Klein of Stanford University holds that some cognitive advance like the perfection of language underlay the burst of innovative behavior shown by Upper Paleolithic people and their predecessors in Africa.
Why did the Neanderthals fail to adapt when modern humans arrived on their doorstep? Under Dr. Klein’s hypothesis, the reason is simply that they were cognitively less advanced.
posted
The orthodox arguments concerning the Neanderthals going extinct don't make sense.
The Neanderthals were the Eurasian-environment version of Homo Erectus. That would mean that there had to be African and Asian versions of Erectus--both whom came to dead-ends like the Neanderthals.
Yet there are no comparable discusssions of why Homo Erectus Africanus and Homo Erectus Asiaticus also went extinct.
I just want to belive that after surviving for some 500,000 years or so, past hominid lineages just came to a halt.
Note that it took some 10,000 years of co-existence with Homo Sapiens before the Neanderthals went extinct. The same thing must have happened in Africa and Asia. Thus, if there was competition for resources it must have been very attentuated.
It's only very recently that groups--the 50,000 year settlement of Indigenous Australians, and a major portion of the 10,000 settled inhabitants of the Americas-- that have survived for thousands of years are now on the verge of extinction--or as in the case of the Tasmanians, already extinct--after engaging in resource conflict with migratory groups from Europe.
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Mind you the main reason that anthroplogists are so focused on Neanderthals (other than the Eurocentric fact that they were the original Europeans) is that they were the only human species around by the time our kind (Homo Sapiens) left Africa.
Also, while all hunter-gatherers follow a division of labor where men hunted and women gathered, it was not that strict in that occasionally in some societies women can take part in the hunting as well.
Australian aborigine women were known to track down and kill small animals. And there is even evidence on rock paintings in the Sahara of African women armed with weapons like bows and arrows probably to hunt big game.
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posted
^Well they did say it happened during times of starvation, so that would be survival cannibalism. What about actual ritualized cannibalism?
By the way, we know that Homo Sapiens in Europe have practiced ritualized cannibalism long after Neaderthals as indicated by both archaeological and historical evidence (reports by Greeks).
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posted
i wonder how different the world would be if the Neaderthals survived?
I partly disagree with the notion of that being the main reason why they went extinct... weren't they divided into isolate clans that migrated with animals. So wouldn't the effects of the women joining in a hunt just a unique event? Its very likely their demise was conbination of events that impacted thier society...
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