A recent article on Science Daily says that Neanderthals weren’t the victim of climate change so much as competition from modern humans. This seems reasonable because a couple of days earlier a paper reported that there was evidence that in North America some 10k years ago humans were slow-roasting a great number of plant bulbs for food. The interesting part of this was that said roasting had to take place over a couple of days to work, that otherwise these bulbs (lilys?) were inedible.
More interesting yet, a couple of other articles help paint a big picture. One was an osteological study of musculature. Seems that modern humans had developed patterns that could only result from repeated motion, almost entirely from spear chucking. None of the neanderthal skeletons had this signature. They didn’t throw. And then there was the article that was trying to blame global warming on the demise of megafauna and concluding that this wasn’t really the whole story.
So let’s look at the various bits and pieces and see what we have.
Neanderthals hunted megafauna, but they used spears. They were able to sustain small bands. Modern humans developed spear throwers (atlatl?) and such and were able to bring down more game with the same effort. More efficient. This resulted in larger populations being possible.
Eventually as megafauna were hunted out moderns were able to use their tech to go after smaller/faster game. Neanderthals were not. Moderns supplemented diets with slow roasting and other technologies. None of this stuff shows up in the record until after the megafauna are gone. Coincidence? Nope. Neanderthals exhibit no evidence of slow roasting and other tricks. Moderns learned how to eat what was available even if it required elaborate preparation. Essentially this boils down to moderns being able to quickly invent technology to adapt whereas the neanderthals were slow to invent technologies.
Technology is the key to everything.
