University of Cambridge

An article published in this week's issue of the journal Nature by Paul Mellars, Professor of Prehistory and Human Evolution at the University of Cambridge, presents new information on why these populations disappeared so suddenly from Europe around 35,000 years ago.

Neanderthals possessed brains as large as ours and were highly efficient hunters and experts at manufacturing stone tools and hunting weapons. They also had large, strongly built bodies and relatively short limbs, adapted to life in the extremely cold conditions of the last two ice ages in Europe.

The central problem has always been why these populations were replaced so abruptly by the new Homo sapiens populations, who are known to have originated in the warm, tropical climates of southern Africa.

Professor Mellars suggests that although they were less well adapted to cold glacial environments, the new populations from Africa possessed more advanced brains, together with more elaborate forms of language. They may well have possessed the new FOXP2 gene, which is known from recent genetic research to be related to more advanced language abilities.

Strong clues to these mental abilities have been provided by recent archaeological discoveries in Africa, which suggest that the capacities to produce abstract art, personal decorations, elaborate bone tools and more efficient hunting weapons appeared in South Africa between 80,000 and 100,000 years ago. This, most probably, reflects new language structures and more advanced patterns of social co-operation and communication among the new Homo sapiens populations.

Equipped with these new abilities, the Homo sapiens people who entered Europe in the middle of the last ice age would have been able to compete much more effectively with the local Neanderthals for food, hunting territories and the scarce fuel supplies that were essential to survival in the harsh, treeless landscapes of Europe.

In addition, DNA recovered from Neanderthal skeletons and from skeletons of early modern humans indicates that there was very little if any interbreeding between the two populations. It also suggests that they belonged to biologically separate species.

Professor Mellars commented: ' It was presumably the more advanced intelligence, language and behaviour of the new Homo sapiens populations that provided the foundations of all the later developments in culture and advanced civilisations in Europe and elsewhere.'


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For more information, contact:

1. Corina Hadjiodysseos, Press and Publications Office University of Cambridge Tel: 01223 332300; email: ch250@admin.cam.ac.uk

2. Professor Paul Mellars, Department of Archaeology University of Cambridge Corpus Christi College Tel: 01223 338006/ 338000



Reproduced courtesy University of Cambridge Press Office