Synopses & Reviews
Provides evidence that climate change drove Neanderthal extinction, not competition with our own ancestors.
Review
"Clive Finlayson wrote Neanderthals and Modern Humans to promote a different view, that climate-not invaders with more sophisticated culture-condemned the Neanderthals...valuable for its synthesis of the climatic backdrop to later human evolution, which reminds us of the remarkable climatic challenges that our Pleistocene predecessors had to face." Science
Synopsis
Why did the Neanderthals go extinct? Were they just out-competed by our own ancestors? This book provides compelling evidence that populations of both species existed side by side for some time, and that it was the Neanderthals' failure to adapt fast enough to changing climatic conditions that sounded their death-knell.
Synopsis
During the Pleistocene, human populations spread across the world. The Neanderthals were a people native to Europe who became extinct between 40 and 30 thousand years ago. Neanderthals and Modern Humans challenges the commonly held view that this extinction was caused by the arrival of our ancestors, Modern Humans, from Africa. Instead, Clive Finlayson provides evidence that it was because the Neandertals could not adapt fast enough to changing ecological and environmental conditions, and that their relationship with Modern Humans, where they met, was subtle.
About the Author
CLIVE FINLAYSON is Director, Museums and Heritage in the Government of Gibraltar, and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto.
Table of Contents
Preface and acknowledgements; 1. Human evolution in the Pleistocene; 2. Biogeographical patterns; 3. Human range expansions, contractions and extinctions; 4. The Modern Human - Neanderthal problem; 5. Comparative behaviour and ecology of Neanderthals and Modern Humans; 6. The conditions in Africa and Eurasia during the last Glacial Cycle; 7. The Modern Human colonization and the Neanderthal extiction; 8. The survival of the weakest; References; Index.