The cousins were fierce hunters stalking mammoth as readily as great bison and bear. On the coasts seafood may have helped round out the diet and they gathered in whatever other bounty they encountered. The evidence from grave sites indicated they were well aware of human mortality and honored their dead. These were big brain, aware individuals who were strong and agile, made tools and had mastered fire. Technically they are called Homo neanderthalensis but we will use the family name, Neanderthal. Of course, technically again, they were not really cousins but...with 99. 5 % identical DNA, they were almost the kissin' kind.
So what happened to them? Where are they now? Aha! About 60 thousand years ago, they had some unexpected and uninvited company. At first the visitors were small in numbers and there is even evidence that in several sites in the vicinity of Qafzeh Cave in Israel, the same area was inhabited by the cousins and the visitors alternately. But that was early on. Like Europeans to the New World; the visitors just kept on acoming.
These visitors from Out of Africa are called homo sapiens, Cro-Magnon, modern humans or finally...just plain, us. We, or rather, our ancient ancestors were the visitors. Over the next thirty or forty thousand years Neanderthals were pushed further and further from their homelands into remote enclaves and finally about 24 thousand years ago, into extinction. All gone, en toto.
The dramatic impact of the arrival of "modern man" is shown in the following maps.
The first panel shows the range of Neanderthal when Cro-Magnon left Africa, crossing the Sinai about 60 thousand years ago. The light gray area denotes Neanderthal occupation and subsequent panels trace their removal as the rather ominous dark gray metastases. The numbers represent the passage of Cro-Magnon generations. The fifth and next to last panel shows the remaining tiny enclaves in Iberia and elsewhere prior to the last panel showing they had been rendered extinct.
Now why and how this happened is subject to much theory consisting primarily in repetition of the same reasoning. As in:
"Neanderthals appear to have had psychological traits that worked well in their early history but finally placed them at a long-term disadvantage with regards to modern humans. Neanderthal mind was sufficiently different from that of Homo sapiens to have been "alien" in the sense of thinking differently from that of modern humans, despite the obvious fact that Neanderthals were highly intelligent, with a brain as large or larger than our own. This theory is supported by what Neanderthals possessed, and just as importantly, by what they lacked, in cultural attributes and manufactured artifacts. Essentially, the Neanderthals lost out because their behaviors and tools eventually became second rate." As weather worsened about 30,000 years ago, it would have taken only one or two thousand years of inferior Neanderthal skills to cause them to go extinct, in light of better Cro-Magnon performance in all these areas."
Jordan, P. (2001) Neanderthal: Neanderthal Man and the Story of Human Origins. The History Press
Hagiography showing Cro-Magnon superiority to Neanderthals appears almost universal so this will be left to others to perpetuate. This is quite understandable as partisanship, but is suspect as good science because these theories tend to overlook or ignore what we do know of human beings. To attempt to understand what befell Neanderthal without consulting our own recorded history is specious if not futile. Mankind has an unbroken record of mayhem and slaughter by all known accounts.
To attribute the demise of the Neanderthal populations to their own failures and shortcomings is disingenuous in the extreme. Comparisions of maps of surviving populations of indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere would show vast areas totally denuded of original inhabitants. Maps would show the remainders shoved into obscure regions where they had been driven by aggressors beginning in the fifteenth century.
We are an intolerant species who cannot brook competition in any form and will main or slay all who intrude. This has been demonstrated time and again throughout our past and continues to this day. Any notion of fairplay or leeway having been extended to our Neanderthal cousins is unwarranted. Without much doubt, we caused their demise. To view our ancient predecessors as simple cavemen or bucolic Troglodytes flatters the memory of what we were and what we still remain: the Murder Apes.
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