Abstract
The causes of Neanderthal disappearance about 40,000 years ago remain highly contested. Over a dozen serious hypotheses are currently endorsed to explain this enigmatic event. Given the relatively large number of contending explanations and the relatively large number of participants in the debate, it is unclear how strongly each contender is supported by the research community. What does the community actually believe about the demise of Neanderthals? To address this question, we conducted a survey among practicing palaeo-anthropologists (total number of respondents = 216). It appears that received wisdom is that demography was the principal cause of the demise of Neanderthals. In contrast, there is no received wisdom about the role that environmental factors and competition with modern humans played in the extinction process; the research community is deeply divided about these issues. Finally, we tested the hypothesis that palaeo-anthropologists’ stand in the debate co-varies with their socio-political views and attitudes. We found no evidence for such a correlation.
Highlights
The causes of Neanderthal disappearance about 40,000 years ago remain highly contested
According to a first category of hypotheses, the event was causally related to the migration of modern humans into territories occupied by Neanderthals: resident bands of Neanderthals and incoming bands of modern humans found themselves in competition for the same limited resources
Respondents were requested to estimate the strength of the causal contribution of a set of demographic factors, a set of environmental factors, and a set of factors pertaining to competitive interaction between modern humans and Neanderthals
Summary
The causes of Neanderthal disappearance about 40,000 years ago remain highly contested. A long-standing debate in palaeo-anthropology is the demise of Neanderthals approximately 40,000 years ago[1] Given their close resemblance to modern humans, and their prolonged success in surviving in Eurasia Even in the absence of competition with modern humans, Neanderthal populations might, generally, have been too small to persist in the long r un[25,26,27,28] Their small size and limited interconnectedness would have made them highly susceptible to inbreeding (viz., reduction in fitness of individuals that arise from matings between genetic relatives), Allee effects (reduction in population growth rates due to problems in mate-finding), and stochastic fluctuations (sudden drops in population size due to random fluctuations in births, deaths and sex ratio)[28,29]. These factors include general climatic instability[30,31,32,33], extreme climatic conditions due to volcanic activity[34], the introduction of pathogens by modern humans into the immunologically naïve Neanderthal p opulation[35,36,37]
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