• Question: what wiped out the neanderthale cave men but not the other type of cave men?

    Asked by totallygnarly to Steve, Julian, Jemma, Eoin on 18 Mar 2011.
    • Photo: Julian Rayner

      Julian Rayner answered on 17 Mar 2011:

      Totally gnarly question. Not really my field, but I know there is a big debate about it, and particularly whether they were wiped out by competition by more advanced Homo sapiens, our direct ancestors, or whether the two populations co-existed and even perhaps interbred.

      One of the ways we will know for sure will be to sequence the Neanderthal genome (complete set of all their DNA) and compare it to ours. People are extracting DNA from Neanderthal bones to do just that – should be done in the next few years. Will be exciting to learn the answer…

    • Photo: Jemma Ransom

      Jemma Ransom answered on 17 Mar 2011:

      I really have no idea I’m afraid. My guess would be some form of climate change, this is a common cause of extinction. As the conditions on Earth change, certain species find it difficult to adapt and this causes extinction, what you need here is an evolutionary biologist!

    • Photo: Stephen Moss

      Stephen Moss answered on 17 Mar 2011:

      Hi totally

      I’m not an anthropologist (the kind of scientist that studies this type of problem), but I think there is evidence that modern humans (Homo sapiens) might have evolved separately from Neanderthal man. In other words they were two related but different species living at the same time. It is possible that Homo sapiens was just smarter, bigger, stronger, and that in the competition for food and territory they pushed the neanderthals to extinction.

    • Photo: Eoin Lettice

      Eoin Lettice answered on 18 Mar 2011:

      I think what happened is that the environment they were living in changed and the cavemen simply evolved into different forms of early human people. Evolution means that the best adapted species will be better at surviving and multiplying. Eventually, the most well adapted forms will survive and the rest will be wiped out.

      Eoin

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